


Hymns in Our Failings, And In Our Frailties, Symphonies

by orphan_account



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, Intergalactic Circuses, Music, PTSD, Polyamory, Religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-16 00:35:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10560408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Lucy and Alura, with their scars and PTSD and other baggage, love one another but struggle to support each other.Susan Vasquez is a gifted pianist.Lucy gets the bright idea that she should enlist her friend Susan to help Alura recreate the music of her culture and faith as a way of keeping connected with herself.  This gift is so meaningful that it ends up drawing the three of them into something much more.There will be polyamory, faith, doubt, magic, music, and lesbian angst.  And some space stuff, if you guys are nice and play your cards right.(The graphic depictions of violence mostly consist of Lucy remembering things about Afghanistan as part of discussing her PTSD)I have a running playlist for this story featuring all the music that gets mentioned in it, which is a lot.  You can enjoy that here:https://myspace.com/jengiacalone/mixes/in-our-frailties-symphonies-716170





	1. Song in Search of Guidance

**Part I - Song in Search of Guidance**

__ I am lost among the cities of the world  
__ I am wandering among its plains  
__ I am fording its streams that seem to never  
_ Empty into a sea.  
_ __ But always your light colors my path.

__ Oh, Rao, do not turn your face from me  
__ Your child is cold and does not know the way home  
__ Your child sifts for iron among ash  
__ For life among death  
_ Your child seeks your touch  
_ __ To break through the black metal clouds

__ Oh, Rao, do not turn your face from me  
__ Your child’s journey has been long  
__ And you are the red star by which I navigate.  
__ Do not turn your face from me  
__ As my boots sink into soil that even you could not bless.  
__ Embrace me, clutch this child to your chest again  
_ And teach me once more to read the signs  
_ __ That will guide me back to where I belong.

_ – The Raoite Hymnals, Book II _

  
  


**ALURA**

Alura, like most Kryptonians living on Earth, didn’t sleep most nights so much as lay in a kind of waking dream state where her mind stopped thinking so hard about things.  It was strange not to sleep, really sleep.  Even though she’d been here awhile, she still wasn’t quite used to it.  There was never a reprieve from her thoughts, not completely.

Some nights, her senses lay too open, and she had to wall them off a little, reduce the world down to the softness of Lucy’s bed, the warmth of her body next to her, the smell of her jasmine perfume, the gentle tide of her breathing.  She shut out the traffic and the throbbing of the music in the drink houses down the street, and the footsteps of people in the twenty-four-hour market and the dull lament of the black rubber wheels on their shopping carts.  She shut all of it out, and just focused on Lucy.  She found it difficult in those moments, when she was focused so tightly on the clear, honey-brown of her skin, the sculpted curves of her lips, her hip, the slope of her throat as her head lolled one way or the other in sleep, to not feel a sudden surge of hunger for her.  Sex was still new for Alura and she was still both excited and frightened to be so at the mercy of her body’s desires.  A body needed sleep, or food.  Those were things she understood.  But she’d be hard pressed to convince her body that it didn’t need Lucy pressed naked against her, that it didn’t need Lucy’s mouth doing those magical things between her legs, that it didn’t need to feel Lucy bucking underneath her, moaning her name.  She knew she didn’t need it, technically, but at moments, when she focused so intently on her, she was beset with craving that had no equal.  She wondered if this was what it was for those addicted to a drug.  

She felt briefly sorry for those whom she had imprisoned for their addictions.

But, she reasoned, there were far worse drugs than Lucy Lane.

She turned on her side to watch Lucy’s face.  She looked troubled, the way she sometimes did in her sleep.  Alura hoped she wasn’t dreaming about Afghanistan again.  Those dreams were never good.  Sometimes they woke Lucy and she didn’t remember where she was.  Once Alura had been shaken from her waking dream to find herself at the business end of a gun, with Lucy on top of her, trembling and white-knuckled.  Alura wasn’t afraid; Lucy couldn’t hurt her if she wanted to.  The advantage of superpowers.  It made Alura sad, though.  She loved Lucy’s strength and intelligence and courage.  She hated that her sleep was plagued with bad memories and regrets.

She stroked Lucy’s bare shoulder.  After a few beats, Lucy stirred.  “Mm,” she mumbled, “‘Lura.”

Alura smiled.  “Yes, my love.”

Lucy smiled at this, her eyes still closed.  “Was I talking again?”

Alura continued stroking Lucy’s shoulder.  The smoothness of her skin was seductive.  “No.  But I thought you might be dreaming.”

“You don’t have to make excuses to wake me for sex,” Lucy teased, yawning.

“Hm, good,” Alura sighed, and curled herself around Lucy’s sleepy form.  She loved how small Lucy was, how she fit perfectly in the hollow created when Alura wrapped herself around her body just so.  She slipped an arm around Lucy’s waist, and soon her hand was lazily wandering over the soft front of her body; throat, sternum, nipples, stomach, thighs.  She touched her lightly, kissed the back of her neck, and when her sleepy lover seemed ready (Alura could tell this now), she slipped her hand inside Lucy’s silky underwear and stroked her until she gasped, tensed, trembled, and then melted in her arms.  It was so easy to drown out the world with that moment.   _ Yes,  _ Alura thought, _ it is still my favorite thing on this Earth. _

  
  


***

  
  


_ The ship, a shimmering disc, descended through Krypton’s atmosphere, making a dramatic entrance into the center of the city.   Its landing gear deployed with a hiss, and clouds of steam, and strobing blue lights.  It was night, and the propulsors glowed blue through the white steam, diffuse and strange.  Alura could hear the hum of the engines, a strange, multiharmonic pitch, and then something else.  Speakers in the ship’s exterior sprang to life. _

_ “Citizens of Krypton,” a voice barked, “welcome to the greatest show in the galaxy!” _

_ She knew that tone.  They’d been here before.  It was just T’omak’s Galactic Circus.  She took Kara’s small hand and ushed her along. _

_ “A show?” Kara had asked, her eyes wide.  “Can’t we stay and watch?” _

_ Alura shook her head.  “It is the end of the day.  Time for prayer, and then bedtime.” _

_ Kara frowned.  “But I want to see.” _

_ Alura shook her head.  “I have seen it.  It isn’t appropriate for you.”  This wasn’t strictly true:  T’omak’s circus was the usual stuff; aerial acrobatics with propulsor packs, fools in foolish costumes, scantily clad women, a “magician”.  It wasn’t so terribly inappropriate for Kara’s age, but there was little value in such a diversion.  Alura wasn’t fond of circus folk.  And everyone knew there was no such thing as magic. _

_ And then the music began to blare, the fanfare of synthetic instruments and pounding drums.   _

_ “But … music!” came Kara’s sputtering protest. _

_ More strobing lights, now some green and pale gold. _

_ Alura shook her head and sighed.  “Fine,” she relented.  “We can stay only for a bit of the music.” _

_ Kara bobbed up and down with excitement.  The top of the ship opened, and a flat platform pushed up into the air.  On it were six musicians, tall, slender, grey beings, playing various harmony instruments.  They were good, she was forced to admit.  They played bold, strong lines that complemented one another and balanced one another well.  Music always did have a hold on her.  Hearing its sounds were when she felt closest to Rao; at prayer times, singing the hymns.  _

_ So she remained still, hand on Kara’s shoulders as they listened, and watched. _

  
  
  


******

  
  
  


Other nights, Alura found herself too lost in all that was Lucy, to the the point of claustrophobia.  The efficient little apartment they shared felt too small.  Her senses bumped around angrily, and she needed to lie still and extend them, stretch them, in the ways that she couldn’t really stretch her body at that particular moment.  She would make a game of it.  How far away could she smell someone’s food cooking?  How small a sound could she detect?  How far out could she push her senses and still perceive things?  The focus shift was good for her; it made her forget how cramped she felt, how stifled.  It made her forget that she couldn’t really go many places, or that she hadn’t quite worked out what she was doing with herself now that she was here on Earth, and alive.  That she hadn’t entirely made peace with her sister, or rebuilt things with her daughter, who had also made it to Earth before her.  It made her forget that she sometimes felt like she was a burden on Lucy, or that she didn’t quite know who she was now that she was just another refugee, stripped of her rank and privilege.  She just lay, and stretched her senses out, and let them blanket the surrounding areas, trying to see how far she could push and what she could pick up.  

Nothing remarkable at first.  She listened for the traffic.  She had learned to tell the difference between the heavy trucks and the small vehicles.  She had learned to pick out the bicycles, the small, hard scrape of the skateboard wheels.  The thunk of the switches in the traffic lights.  She pushed further.  The hum of the ocean, vast and blue, dropping its foamy kisses against the shoreline.  The beach was miles away, but she could hear it.  The gulls.  The wooden creaking of the boardwalk as people walked its length.  Someone walked with a limp, an irregular shuffle.  She pushed further.

The wind, the hum of the electric system that powered the ferris wheel and the other amusements.  Helicopters.  Airplanes.  Out at sea, motorboats.  Breaking waves.  Boat engines.  

Underneath it, something else.  Something irregular.  Something she thought she had heard before, but not here.  A low humming.  Not a sound of Earth.  But then it was gone.  She wondered whether she had imagined it.  It had been so very far away.

She lay obsessing on it until the sun rose, and she had forgotten everything that troubled her.  All she remembered was that she loved Lucy, and that Lucy needed to go to work.  So Alura rose at six a.m., and prepared her breakfast.  Alura had learned pancakes.  Lucy had taught them to her.  That and black coffee were her favorites in the morning.

  
  
  


**SUSAN**

Susan Vasquez lived in a part of the Hills that a lot of people didn’t realize existed.  When most people thought of the Hills, they thought of places like Lena Luthor’s sprawling French Country estate.  They didn’t realize that there were relatively modest places like the three bedroom rancher Susan lived in, with its humble backyard patio where she could barbecue, and a small in-ground pool.  She lived on the wrong side of the tracks, she always said with a laugh.  Her parents were both dentists, and had decided to move into the middle of National City, closer to where their practice was, because they were tired of the commute.  They originally intended to sell the place, but the real estate market had been down at the time, and it didn’t seem worth it.  So they let her have it to live in.  It was nice, but it was really too much space for her.  One of the bedrooms was an office, another her actual bedroom, and then the third… well, it just sort of existed as a junk pod.  When she had company coming and not enough time to clean, anything that was lying around got gathered up and thrown in there behind a locked door.  

But its main virtue was that it had room for her pianos.  She kept a baby grand in a corner of the large living room near the front bay window, a refurbished Bosendorfer she’d owned since high school.  She’d saved for three summers, and her parents scraped up the rest, and helped pay for the refurbishing.  It cost half of what it would have if she’d gotten it new, and it still replaced the car that she’d have otherwise gotten in her junior year.  But her passion was evident even then, and she was insistent on getting the best instrument she could.  She had learned to tune and maintain it herself; her ear was more than good enough, and she had a kind of surgeon’s calm when it came to handling the tools and delicately massaging its interior workings.  The reward was that she owned the finest instrument she could reasonably afford, and its clear, flawless voice filled her living room every day without fail, each note a reassurance that there was an order to the universe.  After a long shift at the DEO, she still needed to come home and wind down with a bit of Chopin, or work out her frustrations with a movement of Dvorak, or she wouldn’t be able to sleep right.

She had an upright piano too.  It sat by the breakfast nook and she didn’t play it as often as her pride and joy, but it had an unapologetic, aggressive high mid-range that made it great for honky-tonk, Harlem stride, gut-bucket gospel… The Bosendorfer was a Jaguar, but the upright was a ‘67 Chevy, a joyful, over-the-top muscle car.  She felt she couldn’t live without both.

On this particular evening, it was good that she had the pianos for company.  She was drinking Red Stripe after Red Stripe, wallowing in some good old heartbreak-y toccatas, pondering the departure of her most recent girlfriend, Erin.  She had liked this one.  She was relatively free of the dramatic train-wrecks that had been a hallmark of many of Susan’s relationships.  She was smart.  She was a writer, and a pretty good one, too.  She’d understood, or seemed to understand, the role that music played in Susan’s life.  They’d spend relaxed Sundays together, Erin writing while Susan played piano for a while, with the sun from the bay window warming her back and the smell of Erin’s fair trade organic coffee permeating the humid air.  It had seemed like a fit.

But then Erin, like so many others, decided that Susan somehow wasn’t what she’d signed up for.  She had mumbled something about expecting her to be more expressive, more passionate.  Susan could only think,  _ you have sat here with me every Sunday for six months while I bared my soul for you on those ivories, what do you mean not expressive or passionate? _

She had thought Erin had understood her.  But it seemed not.  

  
  


********

 

_ “So what am I listening for, exactly, Henshaw?” _

_ “That's ‘sir,’ now, Agent Vasquez,” Henshaw corrected her. _

_ He'd aggressively recruited her for the DEO.  Her. A music school dropout with no law enforcement or military experience, on the hunch that her personal character and her extremely sensitive hearing would be valuable assets.  The black belt in aikido didn’t hurt either, he said, but he made it clear it wasn’t the main thing.  She still didn't really believe him.  But here she was, in all black, in an underground lair in the desert, surrounded by technology she’d never even thought of, much less seen. _

_ “Sorry, ‘Sir,’” she answered, a little too smartly and she knew it. _

_ Henshaw gave her an implacable stare for a moment but said nothing.  Susan straightened up in her seat.  “What you are listening for, Agent–”  And there was a little too much emphasis on that word, Agent.  “–are any anomalous frequencies or patterns.” _

_ She didn’t understand. _

_ He went on to explain that their instruments were picking up a lot of signal interference in a location where there shouldn’t be any, and he needed her to analyze the interference and find anomalies or patterns to help break down what it was and whether they needed to be concerned about it.  “I know you can hear frequencies,” he added, goading her a little. _

_ She sat next to another agent who showed her how to use the instrument panel in front of her to scrub backwards and forwards through the audio, how to capture specific segments of it and save them to a separate file pool, how to pull them up as waveforms so she could see visual representation of what she was hearing.  “So, I’m just supposed to pick out anything that seems weird and grab it, and put it here?” she asked, pointing to the file bank. _

_ “Basically.” _

_ Henshaw patted her on the shoulder.  “Agent, you can hear it when the G in the fifth octave is a quarter of a quarter tone sharp.  You can hear that there’s more high midrange frequencies in your upright piano than in your grand.  I’m confident that you’ll be able to discern what is and is not worth hearing.” _

_ Damnit.  Henshaw had figured her out.  She wanted to appreciated for her skill, and he did that.  He’d done so from the first time they’d met, back in Boston, after she’d used her aikido and a metal trash can to subdue a rogue DEO drone that had popped up out of the Charles River.  Sign of a good manager, she supposed. _

_ “Yes, sir,” she muttered, and popped the earpiece in.  Even after she became one of DEO West’s best field agents, she still would end up spending a lot of time with that thing in her ear. _

  
  


_ ****************** _

  
  


She turned up on time for work the next day, but a little hung over.  

As she unlocked her station, she felt Director Lane’s presence move up behind her.  Lucy Lane had taken over for Henshaw a few months ago after he split for the city (why did all of Susan’s parental figures seem to do that?).  Lucy Lane was an entirely different animal from Henshaw, and Susan would be lying if she said she didn’t like it.

“Morning, Agent,” came the young major’s quiet, warm voice.  

“Morning ma’am,” Susan sighed, mildly annoyed that the Advil wasn’t quite doing its job.

“You look like ‘who did it and ran,’ Agent,” Lucy joked.

Susan mustered a chuckle.  “I  _ feel _ like ‘who did it and ran’, ma’am.”

“Anything you need to discuss with Rosensweig?”  Vera Rosensweig was an unrepentant California hippie who had somehow become the DEO’s designated psychologist.  Alex Danvers,  Susan’s friend and one of their science officers, had suggested that they put it in place after Rosensweig treated her in rehab.  As it turned out, it helped to have someone on the payroll that the agents could talk to who was familiar with what the organization did and wouldn’t bat an eyelash over the fact that an agent was struggling after watching his partner turned into a space squid, or was dealing with PTSD after a particularly long period of sensory deprivation in an alternate dimension.

Susan shook her head.  “No, ma’am, I’ll be fine.”  She turned around to look at her.

Lucy nodded with a look of understanding.  “Everything okay with Erin?”

Susan shook her head.  “Not really.”

Lucy nudged Susan’s shoulder with a closed fist.  “Let me know if you want to grab a drink later.”

Susan gave her a tight smile.  “You sure Alura won’t mind?”

Lucy laughed.  “No, it’s fine.  She’s not jealous like that.”

Susan watched Lucy stride away with a little pang of regret.  She had always liked her, always felt that they had some chemistry.  Like Hank, Lucy appreciated her talent, and she had a curious mind.  Once, the team had gone out to a bar for some drinks to celebrate a mission and Susan was drawn to the piano in the corner of the bar.  She couldn’t help herself.  She flipped it open and began to rip out some Thelonius Monk.  Most of her co-workers by that point knew she was a damn near world-class pianist, but Lucy was still new there, and she’d come over and watched with interest.  Her piercing blue eyes observed the movements of Susan’s hands and body, the look of focused pleasure on her face.  But it wasn’t the way some women did it; like it was a turn-on, like it was peacock feathers, like it was something that existed for  _ them _ , rather than it being an expression of herself.  Lucy didn’t know a lot about music, but she peppered Susan with questions, and good ones.  How long had she been playing?  What was her training?  What did she think of this particular instrument?  What makes a great instrument?  How did her favorite composers influence her approach how and what she played?  Mercifully, she didn’t ask the dumb question she got so often: how come you’re not touring the world, with talent like that?

Lucy was either kind enough or smart enough not to ask.  Susan knew right away that Lucy was a rare find.  It inspired loyalty in Susan;  she would always follow Lucy Lane into the field, now matter how insane the mission seemed.  And Lucy, who seemed anxious to get out from under her father’s shadow, often led missions that were fairly insane.  Susan always had her back.

Unfortunately, their timing never seemed to line up when it came to dating.  Whenever Susan was available, Lucy wasn’t.  Whenever Lucy was available, Susan wasn’t.  So Susan did what smart women do and decided the universe was telling her that she and Lucy Lane were only ever going to be friends.  But honestly, having a friend who could tell from halfway across the room that something was wrong, could discern what it was without being told, and would immediately offer to take her out for drinks so she could bitch about it was really good enough, she decided.  A lot of people didn’t even get to have that.

She put on the earpiece and pulled up her task sheet for the day.  It looked like there were some oddball signals out over the water last night.  She needed to sort through the mess and see if there was anything to see.  She drank her first coffee a little too fast, and settled in, drinking her second coffee and scrubbing through hours of audio.  Most of it was flotsam:  stray signals from cell phone trees, a burst of interference from a large cruise ship which had been apparently having some radio trouble.  Police radio detritus.  The only standout was a strange, low hum in the middle of the night, that came and went so quickly it would be easy to miss.  It happened a few times.  She captured all four instances, and went about the business of cleaning up the audio, to try and get a clearer version of it to put through analysis.

  
  
  


**LUCY**

Lucy Lane had a Silver Star, the certificate for which she displayed in her office, behind the desk, beside her B.S. from West Point and her J.D. and M.B.A. from  Harvard.  Silver Stars and Purple Hearts didn’t just get passed out like lozenges, her father had told her.  Show them with pride!

The Purple Heart, she didn’t feel wrong about.  She had taken those rounds in the shoulder on that street in Kandahar.  Those were real, as were the row of small, puckered white scars that remained on her skin to remind her of them.  But the Silver Star?  She’d shot a couple of kids in suicide vests.  And they were  _ kids _ .  They were fourteen.  She couldn’t have known that from the distance she was at when she took them down.  And she often asked herself whether it mattered.  They were going to kill a lot of American soldiers.  

Still.  Her father would say that war is awful, and that bravery means sometimes doing awful things.   _ Bravery isn’t shooting children,  _ she thought bitterly.  But her father, the General, would never hear of her squeamishness over accepting and displaying that Silver Star.  Any time he introduced her to new people on his staff, it came with the litany of her accomplishments in Afghanistan, and, if she happened to be out of uniform, a rundown of every medal on her chest and stripe on her sleeves, and did he mention that she served in the Judge Advocate General’s office?

All this overachieving, and yet her mother still favored her older sister Lois, now editor of the Daily Planet.  Multiple advanced degrees, commendations, medals AND a chest to pin them on.   _ But you can’t make everyone happy, can you. _

But now, the DEO was hers to run, at least the branch in the desert.  J’onn had built an exceptional team:  those who were military were highly decorated, brave and competent men and women, and those who weren’t military were equally exceptional;  the scientists, the technicians, the field agents, all brought unexpected and diverse talents to the table.  Severinson was a linguist,  Chao had been an acrobat, Reese had (rumor had it) been a safecracker, and Susan Vasquez was a pianist so good, Lucy didn’t know why she wasn’t playing concert halls in Europe. She had the sense not to ask, though.  That was a question for someone when you were a bit closer with them than she was with Vasquez.

And, no small thing, she’d found love.  It had come to her from across the stars, in the form of a much older woman who happened to be her friend’s mother, but there it was.  The heart wanted what it wanted, and it wanted Alura In-Ze, Supergirl’s mother, refugee from a dead world and former judge of Krypton.  Alura was no stranger to trauma, having watched her world crumble and explode.  They understood that part of each other.  Alura doted on her and attended to her, and that was nice, because Lucy also knew that Alura needed the same sort of attention;  she’d had to be taught everything from pancakes to lovemaking, and she’d taken to all of it with the same sort of rigor that Lucy imagined she’d applied to learning and applying the law when she’d been a judge on Krypton.

There were things, of course, that she couldn’t help her with, like how to cope with losing her entire world, and culture, and getting her head around fitting into a new one.  But she was trying.  She was still hoping that Alura would consent to seeing the DEO’s designated shrink.  Lucy had never been to her, but she’d heard good things, and she imagined it probably would help to sit down with a mental health professional who knew exactly what sorts of things went on at the DEO and not have to talk around them.  
  
  


*******

 

_ Lucy clutched her shoulder, dimly aware of the warm blood seeping between her fingers, knowing she should be feeling pain, and yet…  _

_ Dirt and plaster dust and gunpowder crowded her throat, caked inside her nostrils and at the damp corners of her mouth.  She stalked down the street, toward where the felled bombers lay, their backs of their shattered heads bleeding onto the dirt in the street.  Their vests were still intact.  They were so young.  She remembered being that age.  She was reading Tiger Beat and talking too much on the phone with her friends and going to karate classes and studying.  She tried to picture that self, gunning down two of her peers.  She tried to picture herself, so filled with murder that she would strap explosives to herself to die along with the people she was trying to kill. _

_ What do I do, she thought, and her mind raced.  The world sounded muffled, as if she had cotton stuffed into her ears.  A pair of privates emerged from behind a parked truck and ran toward her, looking for instruction.  She was a captain at that time, after all, and they needed direction.   _

_ She flagged down a young lieutenant and ordered him to raise their bomb specialists to disarm the vests.  Still clutching her wounded shoulder, she took control of the situation, ordered a squad to go street by street to make sure these were the only ones.  She aggressively managed things while she stood there bleeding, and the colonel in charge of this platoon arrived to find that the neighborhood was locked down by the time she passed out. _

  
  


*****************

  
  


And so, ignoring her own problems, as was often her wont, Lucy called Alura and asked, “Hey, it looks like Vasquez broke up with her girlfriend.  I was thinking I’d take her out for a few drinks after work, would you like to join us?”

Lucy waited.  It was inevitable that at least some of that relatively simple statement was going to need to be explained.  It was often hard to predict which one.  

“Vasquez?  The one with the …”  Alura paused, trying to remember how Lucy had described her on one occasion,  “...the good ears?”

Lucy chuckled.  “Yes, the good ears.”

Another pause while Alura continued to process what she’d been told.  Then:  “But isn’t she beneath you?”

Lucy sighed.  Kara was young enough when she came here that she’d been able to shake all that Kryptonian stuff about status and caste.  “She reports to me, yes.  That doesn’t mean she’s beneath me.”

“But in rank…?”

“Yes, in rank, she is.  That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends.”

Alura made a little noise, as if considering this possibility.  “So, broke up?”

“Ah.  Yes.”  She rephrased.  “She had a lover.  They are apparently no longer lovers.”

“I see.  Why?”

“I don’t know.  That’s why we’re going for drinks.  So she can tell me about it.”  Hearing another puzzled silence on the line, Lucy added, “It helps to talk about things.  You know?”

Alura paused.  “I already told you, I am not speaking to your brain doctor, Lucy.”

Lucy laughed.  “I know that!  It wasn’t a form of veiled pressure.  People get dumped out of relationships, they get sad and they usually like to drink a little and talk about it with their friends.  That’s all I meant."

Alura considered her.  “You don’t intend to … ‘dump me out of our relationship’, do you?” she asked, and for a moment Lucy thought she sounded nervous. 

“Of course not,” Lucy chuckled.  “You’re beautiful and intelligent and strong and you understand me, and you make me pancakes and you can fly.  I’m not going find a better deal than that anywhere.” 

“Good,” Alura answered, seeming relieved.  “Then you should go without me.  It sounds like the sort of situation where I wouldn’t read the cues properly or understand a lot of what was being said.  If she’s sad about her relationship–”

“I think she is.”

“–then it’s best I am not with you.  I could make her feel worse.”

“You’re not going to learn the social stuff unless you get out and do it,”  Lucy nudged her.

But it was no use.

“No, Lucy.  Go.  Support your friend.  Do not be home too late.  I have watched a cooking show and learned chicken kiev.  Also dumpling soup.”

That sounded delicious.  Lucy knew that sooner or later, they were going to have to find Alura a vocation that she could stand, but in the meantime, the fact that she was occupying herself with learning to cook incredible meals was one more reason that Lucy felt fortunate to have been there when they pulled Alura out of the pod.  That and her beautiful singing.  They had discovered that she enjoyed jazz, and she would often hear Alura half-singing, half-humming a standard while she worked, when she wasn’t humming some haunting Kryptonian melody, or cursing with frustration because she was confounded by the salad spinner.

Lucy didn’t know what endgame was for them.  She was pretty sure that this wasn’t it.  So she did what she always did when she didn’t know what to do:  she pushed forward and acted confident.  It hadn’t failed her yet.


	2. Song of Reconciliation

**Song of Reconciliation**

Teach me to forgive  
Teach me to receive forgiveness  
Teach me that forgiveness is the highest  
And most noble form of love.

Teach me to mend old bonds that have broken  
Heal old wounds that have festered  
Rebuild old trusts that have frayed  
Teach me again, remind me  
Of this, the highest and most noble form of love.

Teach me, Rao, that like your love for us, your children,  
Our own love is resilient  
That it survives  
That we can reconcile and return to it  
Even in the face of abandonment  
Even when the debt we owe it seems too great.

_Teach us how to bring one another home  
As you have done for each of us a thousand million times. _

_– The Raoite Hymnals, Book I_

  


**ALURA**

She had waited too long, she thought.  Better late than never, Lucy had insisted.  Lucy was the force for moving all of this forward, the wind that pushed into Alura’s sails and moved her across what seemed like an untraversable sea.  She could do this.

She and Lucy sat, on the smaller of two sofas, across from her sister Astra and her two lovers, in their spacious loft apartment in Estrella District.  They all still wore their work clothes:  Alex and Maggie in their tactical blacks, and Astra, impossibly, in a beautiful blue-green suit styled similar to the one she’d seen Kara wear.  It hugged her body and shimmered and caught light and tossed it back in bright little pearls.  Astra was a superhero now, fighting for the very fate of the Earth itself, and she and her two lovers fought beside her, and her soul had seemed to find a home.  

Her sister’s face was weary, but she seemed happy.  She had chosen something that was satisfying her spirit; Alura could see that much as she observed her sister, bookended by these two small, fierce women.  Alura found herself glad that Kara had had someone like Alex to look after her growing up: only someone exceptionally brave and strong could have captured Astra’s heart so thoroughly.

After a few awkward pleasantries, Astra changed into black sweatpants and a soft, loose green sweater, and she and Alura retired to the deck to discuss things that only sisters could. Meanwhile their human lovers, who seemed to know each other well, sat inside, telling stories about whatever it was that humans told stories about to entertain one another.

Alura watched as Astra absently pulled an elastic from somewhere and tied back her hair.  “You seem… happy,” she said uncertainly.  

Astra smiled faintly.  “I am.  I could not have dreamt this, but it is a gift from Rao.”

Alura took her hand across the table.  “I am glad you are alive, and well, and loved.”  Both of them, clearly making conscious efforts to use the more relaxed speech that their partners did, slipped back into the more formal speech patterns that were comfortable to them.

Astra squeezed her hand in answer.  “But it has been incomplete without your presence.”

Alura’s brow furrowed.  “I’ve been too ashamed to face you,” she admitted.  “It… it has been hard for me to find courage in myself when our world, and the identity that I lived within it, is gone.”

“You have nothing to be ashamed of.  I knew why you did what you did.”  Then Astra laughed, a soft, ironic sound.  “I am a hero now, you know,” she chuckled.  “I was a criminal.  Then a general.  Then a villain.  Then a corpse.  We are many things before the universe is through with us.”

Alura felt a tear slide out of her eye.  Willing it back seemed to do nothing.  

“You are no longer a judge,” Astra went on.  “So what?  You are alive when most of our people are not.”  She glanced inside.  “Do you love the human, Lucy Lane?”

Alura nodded vigorously.  “I never believed such things were possible for me.”

Astra leaned back in her chair, and tossed her head back, as if she were going to laugh, but only gave out a bemused sigh.  “Yes, it appears we have that recessive gene after all.”

“What do you think of humans?”  Alura asked her after a long quiet.

Astra shrugged.  “I like them.  Not all of them are as special as my two, of course.  On average, they are foolish, they are immature.  They need to grow up before they make this beautiful planet an uninhabitable mess.  But… I like them.  I like their spirit.  I have come to appreciate their …”  She paused, considering her words for a moment.  “...their carnality.”

Alura’s mouth twisted into a smirk.  “You mean, sex?”

Astra laughed.  “Yes, that too.  I enjoy that immensely.  But I mean, all of it.  They way they eat.  They do such wonderful things with food!”

Alura nodded again, excited.  “Yes!  I am learning to cook a great many things.”

Astra grinned.  “They inhabit their bodies so fully, with such joy.  I have come to discover the virtues of this.  And their music … I could feel Rao’s hymns in my soul, but the humans’ music… I feel in my body.”  She shivered a little, seeming to particularly enjoy some thought that crossed her mind just then.  She leaned forward, her face lighting up.  “Has Lucy shown you rock and roll?”

Alura shook her head.  “Only some..."  She frowned, searching for the term. "...pop music, which I found too simple to be interesting, and something called Sarah Vaughan, which I like well enough.”

Astra clapped a hand over her heart, seemingly overwhelmed at the very thought.  “Rock and roll is glorious.  There is something called ‘Gimme Shelter’ that I must share with you.”  

  


*********************

 

_In her heart, Alura had never trusted any music but the hymns.  They anchored her in ways that nothing else did.  The musicians that she would see when they went on vacations, she enjoyed them, but she never entirely surrendered herself to them as she did the hymns._

_As she stood with Kara, watching the musicians on the roof of the circus ship that had descended through the glittering spires of Argo City, she felt enthralled, but also strange and agitated.  She kept her hands firmly on Kara’s shoulders, alert for the first sign that it was time to depart._

_She enjoyed several rousing pieces of music, as the aerialsts swooped from beneath the ship and performed visual feats with the light trails on their proton packs.  The rhythms pounded, the instruments weaved around each other in a rousing polyphonic frenzy.  It was exciting.  It made her heart beat faster._

_But after a few pieces, she decided it was time to leave._

_She was wise to do so.  The next day, she heard that a number of young people from families of those she counted as friends had gone away.  They had left with T’omak, simply abandoning their duties to their clan and family, and gone away, seduced by the strange beasts, the aerialists and their light trails, and the music, the thunderous, magical polyphonic music._

_She went to the temple that day, and prayed, and sang the Song of Loss for her friends.  She knelt among the rows of benches in the red light that streamed through the temple window, and the hymns soothed her worries, and touched her gratitude that her daughter was not among those who had been swept away.  She went to the temple and thanked Rao, and her grieving heart found a home in those songs of devotion._  
  


**********************

  


Alura’s heart turned in her chest.  “I miss the hymns,” she sighed, feeling suddenly sad.  “They do not have hymns like we had.”

Astra shook her head.  “Ah, not so!  There are a multitude of faiths here on Earth, each with their own hymns, each having a unique flavor according to the culture which birthed them.”  She enthused for several minutes about Handel’s Messiah, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Shlomo Carlebach.  Alura was dizzy with how much knowledge Astra had devoured in her time here.  

She finally interrupted Astra’s soliloquy, grasped both her forearms, and asked, “Can you forgive me for sending you to Fort Rozz?”

Astra smiled, looking a little sad, but gentle.  “You kept me alive.  By no other circumstance would I have come to such happiness as I have now.”

They leaned together, and still gripping one another’s forearms, Alura began to sing the one hymn that burned in her chest at this moment, The Song of Reconciliation.  Astra paused, and then as the second stanza began, she joined her, their twin voices carrying the melody, and then Astra’s splitting off into the microtonal harmony that accompanied it.  They finished, weeping in each other’s arms:

 _“Teach us how to bring one another home  
_ _As you have done for each of us a thousand million times.”_

After that, they dried their eyes, and then they rejoined their mates inside, who were preparing a dinner that smelled wondrous.  They dined, they talked, and Astra and Alura took turns embarrassing each other with childhood stories.  She needed a new life and a new identity.  Lucy had been her first building block.  She had, she thought with satisfaction, found another.

“Talk with your daughter,” Astra whispered as they were departing.  “She needs you as much you need her.”

  
  


**LUCY**

Alura had seemed restored after talking with her sister.  She seemed surprised at the degree of ease with which Astra had folded her old faith into the life she shared with her two loves, whose beliefs and states of faith were so different.  

It had made Alura adamant that Lucy must also reconcile with her father.  They hadn’t spoken in months, not since Lucy had accepted the job as Director of the DEO West.  Her father’s interest in alien life on Earth extended only as far as defending Earth from it.  Lucy, in the beginning, had had to work to prove her good faith to Alura, because it had somehow gotten back to her that Lucy’s father had been responsible for the torture of Astra during her imprisonment at the DEO.  General Lane was an old-school, nativist, hawkish, gloves-off kind of man.  He had little patience for the delicate fact of the DEO’s comprehensive mission: not only neutralizing hostile aliens, but safeguarding the friendlies.  It was a difficult needle to thread.  Her father had not expected her to take up the task, and had not been happy when she had.

So here she sat, on a long lunch, in a steakhouse in downtown National City, while he gave her hard stares from across the table.  

“How are all your little green men?” he demanded harshly.

“Some of them are women,” she parried.  It wasn’t off to a good start.

“How do you think this looks for me?”

She sighed.  “Dad, honestly, I don’t care.  I like the work.  I get to bring all my skills to bear.  I get to see things that I’d never get to see otherwise.”  She wiped her palms on her black trousers.  “I’m in command of an incredible facility with incredible people doing unbelievable things.  Can’t you just be proud of me?”

Her father loomed across from her, storm clouds sizzling around his eyes.  She could practically feel the electricity around him.  “You know how I feel about aliens.  I don’t want them here.  And I’m certainly not happy with you playing footsie with so damn many of them.”

Lucy pressed her fingers to her temples.  “Dad, they’re just like people.  There are good ones and bad ones.”

He shook his head.  “Oh, like your friend Supergirl?  And her aunt, what do they call her now?  The Tree Hugger?”

“She goes by the name Starfall, Dad.”

He grunted.  “I don’t care what she calls herself.  I don’t like that you’re associating with these creatures instead of locking them up or just…..”  He broke off, gesturing vaguely, and then sipped at his scotch.  “I tell you what, Luce, I had less of a hard time with hearing you were a queer than I do with this stuff.  I don’t care for the queer, but at least it’s not a threat to national security.”

Her throat tightened.  This wasn’t what she came here for.  “Dad… I’ve bled for this country.  How can you suggest I would do anything less than defend it?”

He grunted. “I think your time with that Olson boy made you soft on these aliens.  Got you thinking they’re human.”

Her hand shook.  She couldn’t help it.  She was getting angry.  She gripped the edge of the table.  “Some of best people I know are aliens.”

He glared at her over the rim of his rock glass.  His eyes narrowed and he said nothing for a few excruciating moments.

“We’re family,” she said in a low, wavering voice.  “We need to be family again.  We can’t let these things get between us.”

“I’ve always been proud you followed in my footsteps, Lucy,” he rumbled finally.  “But I can’t take pride in what you’re doing now.  You put this in between us by accepting that position when you knew how I’d feel about it.”

“I’m not walking away from this job.”  Her voice barely sounded like her own.  It was this dark, seething sound that she rarely needed to use anymore.  She wanted to tell him she’d taken an alien lover, just to hurt him.  But her better judgment prevailed.  She stood up, gazing at him with a manufactured calm.  “But I am walking away from this conversation.  I wanted us to be close again, but you’ve made that impossible.”

And she stalked out into the warm, humid afternoon.

Her phone rang.  It was Susan.  She put it to her ear.  “Lane.”

“Ma’am, just wanted you to know we got a heads up about what looks like an alien-bashing incident in Mercado District.  Witness accounts say a group of guys in fatigues beat up a Boktan shop owner on Wilshire by the Korean theater.”

She stiffened.  “I’m gonna go question them.”  The local PD didn’t give a shit about these kinds of things, except for Maggie Sawyer, but she was DEO too, now.  

Susan’s tone was that concerned one Lucy recognized but mostly ignored.  “Ma’am, reports say there were at least four, maybe you should wait for backup?”

“No, it’s fine.  I’m just gonna go ask some questions.  I’m practically around the corner.”

An awkward pause.  “Ma’am, you’re halfway across town.”

“Same difference.  I’m heading over.  Thanks, Vasquez.”  
  


**************************

  


_When Lucy was six and Lois was nine, their parents brought them out to the lake house on summer weekends.  Lucy was, as ever, small and trying to keep up with her taller, cooler, (she thought) prettier sister.  Lois had taken swim classes at the Y, and could jump off the little dock and swim out a little ways, and then swim back.  Lucy had not learned yet, but was undeterred._

_Ignoring her mother’s warning, she jumped into the water.  Her skin was hot, because she’d been baking in the sun on the little wooden dock.  For a brief moment, she was suspended in exhilaration in the warm summer air before she splashed down into the blue-gray water, breaking its thin surface and sending spray in all directions.  She descended into the water so quickly, but each second felt like a minute._

_She flailed, arms and legs struggling to pull her above the water, but she sank.  She kicked, and rose for a moment, and then sank again.  The water was like ice against her hot skin, and she felt tiny bubbles clinging to her toes and ankles and rolling up her limbs as she thrashed.  Water invaded her nose and mouth and she wanted to cough and spit but she couldn’t because there was only more water._

_It felt like an eternity before her father’s arms plucked her from the lake._

_Lucy’s memories of that were vivid.  She found it funny that it stayed with her all of these years, and that it tended to resurface at the oddest of moments._

  


**************************

  


Had Lucy worn her dress uniform to lunch, with all her medals, things might have gone down differently.  But she’d made the calculated choice that she wanted to appeal to her father as who she was, not dress up like who he wanted her to be.  So she wore her DEO blacks.

She was now regretting the decision.  A heavily decorated Army major would definitely have commanded a different kind of respect from the rowdy group of soldiers, half a dozen young privates and specialists who were still crawling the streets of Mercado, looking for a place to get drunker than they already were in the middle of the afternoon.  They’d been tossed out of one bar already.  

There was no mistaking them when she came upon them being refused entry to a fancy tapas joint with a high-end bar in back.  The questioning turned hostile pretty quickly, and devolved into fisticuffs not long after that.

She’d taken the first two without trouble, but they were drunk and a little surprised that such a tiny woman was that skilled and that dangerous.  Things went badly after that.  She took a lot of blows.  She wasn’t sure how many.  Her head hit the pavement and then for a while, she could still hear but couldn’t see.  She heard tires screeching, and more sounds of fighting, scuffling, hands thudding against flesh.  Metal.  Cuffs, maybe.

She winced as she felt hands against her face.  She knew the flesh and bone underneath those gentle fingers was damaged.  

Susan Vasquez’s voice.  “Ma’am?”

Lucy coughed a little.  It hurt in places it shouldn’t.  “Vasquez.”

“Jesus, thank god,” Susan’s voice exclaimed, and she sounded relieved.  “You look like who did it and ran.”

“I _feel_ like who did it and ran, Agent,”  Lucy mumbled through pulpy lips.  She spit a little to get the taste of blood out of her mouth.

“Are you okay?”

“No, not really.”

She heard sirens.  Engines.  “Alright, well, don’t worry, we’re getting you to a hospital.”

 _Oh come on,_ Lucy thought, _it can’t be that bad, can it?_

And then more softly, she heard Susan say, probably more to herself than to Lucy, “I fucking told you to wait for backup.  For Christ’s sake.”

  
  


**SUSAN**

 

Susan sighed heavily.  “No.  Mom, no.  Come on, stop making this hard.  Just…. _presiona el botón!  ...El botón rojo!  Si!_ Jesus Christ!”   _Press the button!  The red button!_

“ _No veo un botón rojo!  Estás siendo muy grosero,”_ her mother pouted on the other end of the phone.   _I don’t see a red button.  You’re being very rude._

Her mother had called at an inconvenient moment, looking for Susan’s assistance with her voice mail.  But Susan was too anxious, and too sore from handing those GIs their asses, to be much help to her right now.

“Yeah.  Ok.  Of course, Mom, I'm sorry.  This is just _un mal momento_.   _Mi amiga_ _esta en el hospital._  I'll call you later, ok?”   _This is a bad time.  My friend is in the hospital._   She could hear the irritation in her mother’s voice when she would give up in the middle of a sentence and lapse into English, but she couldn’t help it.  She didn’t have the concentration in her right now to keep it all in Spanish.  There was no real reason to keep it in Spanish; her mother's English was just fine. But her mother wanted her to keep that part of her heritage and Susan had never been as serious about it as her mother would have liked.

She glanced around the hospital floor, agitated.  Lucy would be fine of course, but Susan still hated hospitals.  

“OK, OK.   _Llámame luego.  Te amo, pequeña._ ” _Call me later.  I love you, little one._

“Ok… _yo también te amo,_ ok? Bye bye.”  

She stuffed the phone in her pocket.  How could Jimena Vasquez be a skilled dentist and yet not be able to handle checking her voicemail?  She confounded Susan on a regular basis.

She felt a gentle hand on her shoulder.  She spun around to find Alura standing behind her, blue eyes dark with concern.  “You’re Susan Vasquez, right?”

Susan nodded.  She'd fished Alura’s number out of Lucy’s phone while they were loading her into the ambulance.  She'd come immediately.

“Thank you,” Alura said, and she gripped Susan's forearms in a gesture that felt strangely specific.  

She nodded.  “Yeah, of course.”  She shook her head.  “I'm just sorry I couldn't get there sooner.”  She looked down at Alura’s hands on her forearms, then back up at her face, and her trembling chin.

“I'm glad you were there at all.”  She shook her head.  “I don't understand why she needs to do these reckless things.”  Alura's eyes welled up.  “It is as if she forgets she is breakable.”

Susan smiled uneasily.  “I don't think she forgets.  I just think she doesn't care sometimes.  That's why I'm always five steps behind her if I can help it.”

Alura peered down the hallway for a moment.  “Where is she?”

Susan nodded down the hall.  “She's getting patched up.  She needs a few stitches, and I think they're gonna set her wrist.”

“It's broken?”  

Susan nodded.  “Could be worse.  Hairline fracture.”  She squeezed Alura’s forearms, feeling a little awkward.  “She’ll be back to 100% in no time.”

She withdrew from her grasp and pointed toward some uncomfortable looking plastic chairs.  “I'm going to wait while they work, if you don't mind the company.”

“I am glad for it,” Alura replied, and they sat next to each other.  After a few moments of awkward silence, Susan realized Alura was looking at her intently.

“Um… Do I have something on my face?”

Alura seemed to flush a little and looked at the floor.  “No, I'm sorry… Lucy has mentioned something about you having good ears.  I was attempting to determine what was remarkable about them.”

Susan chuckled.  “It's what they can do that’s remarkable, not what they look like.”

Alura looked perplexed.  “What can they do?”

“Uh, well, I have perfect pitch and pretty good sensitivity to variations in frequency.”  

Alura gave her an embarrassed smile, comprehending.  “Good ears.  I see.”  She tapped her own ears.  “I also have good ears, at least since I came here.”

“I'm sure I can't compete.”  

This was true across the board, Susan thought.  Even without powers, Alura was tall and beautiful and clearly intelligent and obviously loved Lucy.  And for God’s sake, Lucy had left early when they went for drinks the other night because Alura was preparing some fancy dinner.  Susan couldn’t compete with any of that.  She footnoted with irony that she'd also been interested in Alex Danvers at one point, and now Alex was with Alura’s sister.  It was hard to be mad about losing out to the In-Ze twins, though.  They were genetically flawless specimens.

She couldn't help feeling, though,  that once again a pattern had emerged in her life.  A theme and variation.  She wondered whether they were meaningful patterns, or simply the fractal nature of the universe repeating on itself.

They talked for a while about a number of things, and Susan discovered that Alura had a very similar nature to Lucy in the way she asked questions.  Her approach to learning was unabashedly Socratic, unashamed of asking questions even if they seemed obvious.  Her questions were good, thoughtful, seeking to draw connections and form an understanding.  It was no wonder she and Lucy matched so well.  It must be that they both thought like lawyers.

“So, were you in the military like Lucy before you joined the DEO?” Alura was asking.

“No,” Susan laughed.  “I had actually just dropped out of music school.  It's kind of a funny story.”

  


*****************

  


“ _You've had the necessary hours of firearms training,” Henshaw informed her, unmoved by her objections.  “You'll be with experienced agents.”_

_“But sir, I don't know if I'm ready to -”_

_“Agent Vasquez,” he'd interrupted.  “This team needs a fifth person and you are the obvious choice. You are a competent marksman and a black belt in aikido.  Your performance in your training ops has been exemplary.  I have full confidence in your ability to handle yourself should things go sideways.”   Susan had never received a string of compliments in such an annoyed tone of voice before.  Well, she had.  But it had been from him._

_It was funny.  He never appealed to her bravery, or to her fear of being labeled a coward, or her fear of disappointing him (although she did fear that).  He appealed to her belief in her own skill.  It worked.  Every time._

_She did fire shots on that mission.  She did engage and put down a hostile.  She wasn't very surprised by that: she had the skills.  But she discovered that she enjoyed it more than she thought she would.  That she enjoyed the knowledge that she had neutralized a threat.  That she had saved lives that day._

_It took her some time to fully absorb that.  To realize that while it had been a strange path that led her here, it had been the best one she could have taken.  It was a weird feeling, fitting in.  She wondered if she'd ever get used to it._

  


****************

  


The continued chatting away, and Susan found that the time passed easily.  

“Was that Spanish I heard you speaking when I first walked up?” Alura asked at one point.

Susan gave her a wry smile.  “Well, it was Spanglish.”  She saw Alura’s puzzlement in the tilt of her head.  “My Spanish isn’t very good,” she explained, “so I fill in the holes with English.  My mom hates that I do that.”

“Yes, it can be difficult to learn a language without the advantage of the aids I had in the pod,” Alura agreed.

Susan then asked her a bevy of questions about that; how long had she been in the pod, how did she learn English, was the textbook, proper English that was taught in the pod the reason for why the patterns of Alura’s speech often seemed a bit formal at times?  

And time continued to slip by, barely noticed.

It was a few hours before they were allowed in to see Lucy.  She was semi-conscious and looking very much worse for wear, but it was still an improvement over when Susan had last laid eyes on her.  She heard a little gasp from Alura and instinctively placed a hand on her back to make sure she was steady.  

“Jeez, Luce,” she exclaimed, dropping any pretense of formality.  “Next time ask them for a safe word.”

“Vasquez is my safe word,” Lucy shot back, her wits clearly not having suffered entirely with that blow to the head.

Alura shook her head, frowning.  “My love, you were fortunate that Susan came to assist you.”

Lucy smiled crookedly.  “Yeah well, she could have gotten there a little sooner.  Look at this mess.”

Susan and Alura moved closer to the bed.  Lucy’s hospital gown was drooping off her shoulder, threatening to slip down and reveal cleavage.  Susan quickly tugged it upward to cover her better.  “Put that away, you're gonna get us all killed.”

“That's what your mom said,” Lucy grunted.

“That answer doesn't work for everything, ma'am.”

“Yeah it does, Agent.”

They flipped each other the bird.

Susan was mindful of Alura’s eyes, watching their interaction, and didn’t want to appear overly familiar, so she stepped back and got out of the way while Alura fussed over her beat-up girlfriend.  

After lingering for a few minutes in the doorway, watching while their world shrunk down to just each other, exchanging soft words that had meaning only between the two of them, Susan cleared her throat and announced, “So uh, if you're done scaring everyone half to death, ma’am, I'm gonna get going.  I'll check in on you tomorrow.”

Lucy nodded in her direction, gratitude on her exhausted face.  “Have the work-ups ready on that signal you were looking at.  I'll want to see what you've got.”

“What, you want me to bring them here?”

“Is that a problem?”

Susan sighed.  “No, ma'am.”  And under her breath she grumbled, “Workaholic.”

Alura clearly heard her, because she smirked. “What signal? What could be so important as to be worth disturbing her rest?”  She disengaged from Lucy and came over, and she was clearly half serious, but half amused at Lucy’s stubborn refusal to break stride even under these circumstances.

Susan shrugged.  “I heard something weird the other night.”

Alura smiled.  “Me too.”  She tapped at her ears again.  “Good ears.”

“Right,” Susan chuckled.  “Good ears.”

Then Alura took her by the forearms, much as she had before, and looked at her with emotion welling in her large eyes.  “Thank you for calling me,” she said softly.  “And for looking after her.”

Susan shrugged.  “If I were in your position, I'd want someone to do the same.”  

Alura’s eyes shone.  “Nevertheless,  be well, Susan.”

Susan left, feeling wrung out, but also somehow like she had resolved something.  She was finally ready to close the door on Lucy as a romantic possibility.  She couldn't compete with Alura, and what was more, she didn't want to.  She liked her.  She saw how they fit, and how they cared for each other.  She was content to be Lucy’s friend and cleanup crew.  

Honestly, who else was going to look out for Lucy Lane’s dumb ass when her superpowered girlfriend wasn't around?

Susan was suddenly anxious to get home.  Her fingers were itching to play, the muscles in her arms suddenly dying to stretch and feel “Rhapsody in Blue” pounding through them.  She was ready to forget that she had ever been sore.


	3. Song of Remembrance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy recovers from her injuries and gets a bright idea.
> 
> Alura becomes closer with her family and faith, and finds peace.
> 
> Susan remembers her own value.

**Song of Remembrance**

For though we are mortal and our lives are short  
We easily forget.  
Help me Rao, help your child to remember.  
Memory keeps us in one another’s hearts  
In one another’s service  
It binds us to our duties and is the backbone of our honor.  
Memory of those we call our homes  
Sustains us when we are far from one another.  
Memory of your light warms us when we are far from you.

Memory is what makes our souls and selves,  
Each of us a bundle of glowing sparks that  
String together our stories  
That decide who we are and who we will become.  
Memory of the good deeds we do,  
Memory of our regrets,  
Memory of those who have left us and now wait for us  
In your light,

Memory of all the times we have been loved  
Memory of you, our loving father,  
Who helps us to keep faith with those memories,  
With those stories, that make up our lives.

Help your daughter to remember who she is,  
Help your son to remember that he belongs to you,  
Help your people to remember that your light,  
Their destination, waits to receive them.

– The Raoite Hymnals, Book IV

  
  


**ALURA**

“I like your Susan,” Alura told Lucy the next night, after she woke up looking for some more painkillers.  She'd been released home, but was on leave for a week to mend a bit. 

Lucy restrained a small chuckle.  Apparently laughing still hurt thanks to some bruised ribs.  “She’s not  _ my _ Susan.”

Alura peered at Lucy in the darkness for a moment.  “Was she ever?” she asked at last.

Lucy shook her head a little.  She was still in a good deal of discomfort, but Alura felt sure she saw a little regret pinch at the corners of Lucy’s eyes when she answered,  “No.”

This was surprising.  “Why not?  You seemed to have…”  Alura searched for the term that humans used to describe what she had seen, but she couldn’t find it.  “...I’ve forgotten the word that you use, but… You have an understanding between you.  An… an ease.”

Lucy looked at her a long moment and then said, “The timing just never worked out.  Never free at the same time.”

Alura looked over at her phone, where she saw Susan’s text message, still up on the screen from earlier:   _ Hey, just checking in to see if you’re ok.  Do you need anything? _

She smiled.  “She texted me to make sure I was alright.”

Lucy raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.  “Did she?”

Alura nodded.  “She seems very kind.”

Lucy nodded and said nothing more.  

Alura gazed silently at her beautiful, broken human.  She had carried Lucy up the stairs when they got home from the hospital, and she found a deep sense of purpose in caring for her.  They had talked a little about how poorly things had gone with Lucy’s father, and Alura understood that Lucy’s foolishness was no doubt born from the emotions roused in that unsuccessful encounter.  She wished that Lucy could see herself as Alura saw her: kind, beautiful, strong, courageous.  A burning star in the darkest of places.  Impulsively, she leaned down and kissed her chest in a spot that appeared to bear no marks of any kind.

Lucy sighed a little.

Alura began carefully inspecting Lucy’s skin, looking at the bruises and welts, and kissing anywhere she could find that wasn't hurt.

“It's not all broken,” she observed softy.

“No,” Lucy agreed tiredly.  “Not all of it.”

She continued to kiss down Lucy’s body, so carefully and gently.  “If your father doesn't accept you,” she murmured, “I will be your family.”

She could see in the darkness that Lucy’s eyes welled up at that.  Lucy could feel her intentions, and she sighed and tried to shift closer to Alura, but she was still too sore.  “I don't know if I have it in me…” she began to object. 

But Alura floated down the bed, placing no weight on Lucy, murmuring soft things as she eased Lucy’s thighs apart, mindful not to touch any of her injuries or move too quickly.

Alura got her back to sleep without the aid of painkillers, then, by giving her the best feeling she knew how.

  
  


***********

 

After a day or so at home, Lucy found Alura’s doting and fussing oppressive, and she dispatched her to go spend time with her family.  Alura didn’t like leaving her, but Lucy insisted that she was perfectly fine to manage for a few hours pouring her own drinks and operating the remote control with her left hand.  “I’m plenty skilled with my left hand,” Lucy assured her, and her eyes twinkled a little.

Alura kissed the scratched knuckles on Lucy’s left hand and, recognizing the twinkle in Lucy’s eyes, agreed that yes, she was indeed quite skilled with that hand.

Not wanting to re-rouse Lucy’s impatience with her attentions, she quietly prepared a sandwich and left it for her in the refrigerator, only texting her to alert her of its existence after she left the apartment.  Lucy simply texted back:   _ ALURA STOP SDFSDFLSKDJF:SLDFJK. _

And then a moment later:    _ <3 _

She stayed for dinner at Alex, Astra, and Maggie’s apartment, and was fascinated to observe their habits and practices around each other.  Alex held no faith, but she meditated, and there was a designated space both indoors and outdoors for it, demarcated with a soft mat and strings of tiny lights.  Maggie was apparently raised in that strange faith of the nailed god that seemed so prevalent here, and though she held to it only selectively, once Alura had learned the signs of it, she could see its subtle influence and presence; a tiny medallion on a little string around her neck, a string of beads whose precise meaning escaped her but she had been told it was an artifact of her practice.  It appeared that after dinner, they had adopted a custom of sometimes reading aloud together from the epic poetry of Krypton, or the first few Books of Rao as they were preserved within the AI that came to Earth in Kara’s pod.  Alura found it strange to hear the words of the old poems and psalms in English instead of Kryptonian, but the translations fascinated her.  Astra’s two partners seemed to enjoy participating in this simply because it belonged to Astra, and they loved Astra.  It seemed to hold deep meaning for them, even if it was not the meaning that Rao had intended when he gave the words to the Kryptonian people.  

She left, feeling more whole than she had felt when she arrived.  She decided, in a rare moment of lightheartedness, that she would fly home.

  
  


*******

  
  


_ She had memories of Kara, small and soft, climbing into bed with her after a nightmare.  Of comforting her till her little one fell asleep, chin tucked against her shoulder. _

_ She had memories of Argo City’s towers piercing the sky, and the red sun glancing off its many facets.  Pride, she thought, in what was good and beautiful and wise about Krypton. _

_ The youths who came to her door, seeking counsel that they did not wish their parents to know that they sought.  She counseled them to keep to their duty, cleave to their honor.  She had those memories too. _

_ She had memories of bundling Kara into her own little pod, keeping back her tears until her daughter had gone because she didn’t want her to fear. _

_ She had memories of her best friend pleading with her to take the last pod. _

_ She had memories of the first time she saw Lucy, and then the first time she touched Lucy, and then the first time Lucy kissed her, and the moment she knew she was falling in love with Lucy in the way that humans did it, and the first time she and Lucy made love. _

_ The memories wove themselves together, and she used them to sift through the sands of her being, and winnow away all that was not truly her. _

  
  


*************************

  
  


Alura rarely flew anywhere.  She had no particular desire to draw attention to herself.  She also wrestled the irrational fear that the powers would suddenly stop working, despite that this had never happened to her daughter or her sister.  But the fact was, she was now free of the four walls of their small apartment, and it was suddenly a blessing.  No more faint claustrophobia lingering at the periphery of her thoughts.  This was a large, beautiful world, full of humans like Lucy and Alex and Maggie, and her daughter and sister were here, and there was no point in not taking ownership of it, becoming part of it, letting it become part of her as surely as she had let Lucy become part of her.  So she left Astra, Alex and Maggie’s home and let her feet leave the sidewalk, let herself drift up into the air, let herself bank out towards the ocean and go soaring above it for several quiet, blissful minutes under the moonlight before arching her flight back inland and heading toward the home she shared with Lucy.

She was a Kryptonian, yes.  She was a Raoite.  She needed to love and care for others, to be part of a world outside of herself.  She was someone who needed community.  She needed family.  Those were parts of her identity that were non-negotiable no matter where she might be.

She had lost much of who and what she had loved, but she was finding things to love, here.  Those things would become part of what made her herself, just as many parts of Krypton had done.  Not only Lucy, but many other things that were unique to Earth and to humanity.  She was eager for Astra to show her some of the music she had not discovered.  She loved the foods.  And the taste of sea air, and the smells of popcorn and flowers and the roar of motorcycles.  

And sex.  She very much liked sex.

And Susan, she decided.  She liked Susan.  

She wondered if she could hear Lucy’s heartbeat at this distance.  She knew its rhythms well, and apparently, she did have “good ears.”  She extended her senses, and sought it, the strong, vital  _ th-thud, th-thud, th-thud _ as it asserted itself against the inside of Lucy’s chest.  There was a great deal of noise, but she adjusted and adjusted, entertaining herself with the game of slowly filtering out that which was not Lucy.  

She heard that odd sound again, for a moment.  It wasn’t as brief as last time.  She couldn’t place it.  It was naggingly familiar and she couldn’t figure out why.  She paused in mid-flight, held still, hovering in the air above the glittering streams of National City downtown traffic.  She stood, suspended in the starry sky, listening for it, a low hum, that thrummed just at the edge of her hearing, and then was gone.  

Ah, well.  No matter. 

She continued to seek Lucy’s heartbeat until she found it, about a half mile from their apartment.  

She found Lucy, awake and watching a movie, eating the sandwich that Alura had left her.

“See,” Alura teased, “aren’t you glad I left that for you?”

Lucy surrendered, holding up her hand in its plaster cast.  “You win.”  She seemed sincerely glad to see her.  “Did you have a nice time?”

Alura nodded.  “Yes.  And you?”

Lucy shrugged.  “I’m glad you’re back,” was all she said.

  
  


**SUSAN**

Susan was accustomed to sparring with her fellow agents, but it had been awhile since she’d been to Sensei Mori’s dojo in Farraday District.  He was pleased to see her, and invited her to demonstrate with him for the class that filled the spacious, bright room.  The other agents used a variety of styles, depending upon their training, and she fared well against most of them most of them time.

She’d forgotten, though, how different it was to execute the artful forms of aikido with someone who had made it their life, who was a master of deflection rather than of seeking to inflict harm, who could move with her through the swirling energy that surrounded a give and take of this nature.  She was brought down several times, but she finished feeling refreshed, sweating lightly, and he thanked for for giving such a good showing in front of his students.

Susan was feeling liberated.  Letting herself let go of the idea of Lucy, the idea of Erin, the notion of romantic entanglement in general, was allowing her to reach out a tentative hand of friendship to Alura, whom she’d checked up on after they brought Lucy home.  And it was allowing her to remember that she was truly someone with many gifts, and that she deserved to have someone who appreciated them.  Lucy might appreciate them but she was spoken for.  But Susan had decided she wasn’t going to settle anymore.

So she’d begun training again, finding that peace and confidence in the meditative state she entered when practicing aikido with someone skilled.  

And she’d begun playing music that she’d not thought about in a while, grinding the gears to life in parts of her head that she’d left neglected for this reason or that.  She pulled out the sheet music for Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, delving into its thick chord structures and the the mysteries of its strange and dissonant counterpoints.  It was darker-sounding music than her actual mood, but her mind was hungry for the challenge, and this was one she’d not touched in a few years.

At night, when she was too tired to play, she was surprised to find herself putting on an Almodovar film and settling into her sofa, watching with the subtitles off and the close-captioning on, so that she could improve her listening.  She was suddenly, inexplicably irritated with herself for being lazy about her Spanish.

  
  


****************

 

_ The first time she’d seen Maddie, in one of the bars near Berklee, the little redhead was laughing and chatting with one of Susan’s friends, near the jukebox.  She was drinking something blue.  That should have been her first sign.  Girls who drank blue drinks should always set off a red flag.  But Maddie’s eyes had lit up when Susan’s friend introduced them and announced that Susan was “the best pianist in Boston”.  Maddie, Susan would later figure out, had a “plays a musical instrument” requirement in her list of check boxes for what she wanted in a mate.  Susan was too young at the time to understand that. Maddie viewed her talent as a feature, like power windows, instead of a window into her soul and character. _

_ The first time she’d seen Erin, she’d been at a tae kwon do exhibition, supporting  one of her DEO work colleagues.  Erin’s brother had been competing.  Susan had spotted her, with her pixie cut and her tats of Asian lettering, and rolled her eyes.  But she seemed to enjoy watching the matches, had known something about the rules and the style, and by the end of the afternoon, Susan decided she’d go talk to her anyway.  It turned out Erin had minored in Far East studies and spoke Korean and Japanese, and actually understood what her tatoos said.   _

_ The first time Susan had seen Lucy Lane, she’d been in full uniform. Susan wasn’t even sure exactly what all those medals and stripes on her sleeves meant, but she knew it meant this gorgeous woman was a hundred per cent badass.  You didn’t get all that hardware that young without being formidable.  The eyes that burned under the brim of her hat confirmed Susan’s suspicion.  It wasn’t just a fetish for a woman in uniform; she knew fire and accomplishment when she saw it.   _

_ The first time Susan had seen Alura, she was being hustled into the DEO on a gurney.  She was pale, and terrified, and disoriented.  Even through all that, Susan thought, she noticed that she looked almost noble, and that she was strikingly beautiful.  Someone had mentioned that it was Supergirl’s mother, and Susan felt badly in passing, though she wasn’t sure why it was inappropriate to notice that.   _

_ Susan thought that maybe she needed to stop receiving signals, and start putting some into the world for a change. _

  
  


*********************

  
  


She’d broken it down.  Four instances.  When strung together, she couldn’t help feeling that it sounded like a melody.  She brought her laptop over to Lucy’s apartment and played the string of notes for her, at a higher speed.

“Doesn’t it sound like a musical phrase?”  Susan pressed.

Lucy nodded, clearly skeptical.  “I guess so.  What’s your idea?”

Susan got excited.  “I want to duplicate it and send it back.”  She looked expectantly at Lucy, hoping she would get behind this.

Lucy frowned.  “Do we have any idea where it’s coming from?”

Susan hesitated.  “I sent it down for analysis… they… they don’t know.  But they’re pretty sure it’s not coming from something that’s already here.”

“When you say ‘here’,” Lucy asked, clarifying, “you mean…”

“Uh, well.  Earth.”

Lucy nodded.  “So, send it… where?  How?”

Susan paused.  “Well… I thought we could beam it out via GIDEON.  Wide-range broadcast.”

GIDEON (Global Interplanetary DEO Network) was the DEO’s wide-band satellite, capable of transmitting a signal to a number of surrounding star systems.

Lucy scoffed.  “You want to use GIDEON.”

Susan became mildly indignant.  “Why not?  Is J’onn beaming old episodes of Ally McBeal back to Mars or something?”

Lucy sighed.  “Alright, alright.  Settle down,  _ Agent _ .”

Susan couldn’t help laughing when Lucy pulled rank.  Not in cases like this, when she knew Lucy didn’t really mean it.  “I figure,” she went on, “I duplicate it, right?  And then add something new to the end.  And see if I get something back.”

Lucy sipped chocolate Nutrament through a straw and swirled it around in her mouth for a moment.  “Alright.  Keep me apprised.  I’ll indulge you for now.”

Susan couldn’t help jabbing her fist in the air.  Just a little.

 

**LUCY**

Lucy had been spending the week convalescing, enjoying Alura’s attentions more than she wanted to admit, but Alura knew anyway.  She’d have the cast on for five more weeks.  And in the meantime, Susan had been coming by and talking about work with her.  By day two, Lucy had a mini-office set up next to her bed, with multiple laptops and a bluetooth earpiece which of course made her joke that she was going undercover as Susan this week.

Alura’s words as she carefully made love to her that first night she was home still stuck in her chest:   _ I will be your family. _

She was floored by the enormity of it, but it rang true for her the moment she said it.  She wanted to be accepted by people who might or might not be capable of it, and whose love came with conditions of one kind or another.  Life with Alura had its struggles  –sometimes communicating was more work than Lucy was used to because of the cultural barriers, and sometimes Alura refused to get into a taxi because her claustrophobia was feeling particularly sassy that day– but they had chosen each other.  They came with no expectations, only appreciation for each other.

And Lucy had observed that, since Alura had been seeing her sister more, and talking to Kara more, something in her being had lifted a little.  She was singing more strangely beautiful Kryptonian hymns around the house.  She had floated down the bed that night she made love to her, something that made Lucy smile for reasons she couldn’t entirely explain.  Alura was loath to use her powers much, let alone in that particular context.  It was a tiny gift, a little moment of magic, and Lucy treasured it as much as the sex that came after it.

The week marched onwards and she felt less sore, and Susan was coming by every day with reports, stacks of folders, gossip, and sometimes groceries.  Why hadn’t she let herself be closer with Susan before this, she wondered.  She was extending herself in ways that were well outside of her job description.  And she was quietly looking out for Alura, too.  

Family didn’t have to mean blood, she thought.  For too long, she had taken for granted that it did.  But she was choosing her own, now, it seemed.  Or rather, she thought with amusement, they were choosing her.

And now Susan was here, once again, and they’d talked through the work that needed to be talked through and Lucy had agreed to allow Susan to use the GIDEON satellite to follow up on something that was probably nothing.  And Lucy had something on her mind.

“So… Off topic…”  Lucy said after a moment.

“Hm?”

“I… I had a thought.  And I understand if it’s asking a lot.  In fact I know it probably is asking a lot, so… this isn’t like a managerial request, it’s personal.  And I’ll understand if you say no.”

Susan looked both intrigued and a little worried.

“So … it’s been hard for Alura, transitioning to life in this world, and… you know… the more she gets in touch with her old culture and religion and everything, the healthier she seems.  We get along better, too.”

“And?”

“Well, I hear her singing these songs all the time, I think they’re Kryptonian songs, maybe hymns or something.  I wondered if you could work them out for piano and we could make some good recordings and stuff, so that Alura could have that.  You know, a merging of her old world and her new world.”

Susan’s mouth dropped open.  She seemed suddenly stricken with emotion.  “Something wrong?”   _ Did I fuck up?  Did I ask too much? _

But Susan shook her head.  “No, of course not.  I mean … yes, it… it is a lot to ask.  I’m sure it’s another musical system entirely and in all likelihood I’d probably have to tune a piano completely from scratch myself to get something that I could use…”

Lucy started to feel guilty.  “Look, I don’t want to put you way out, if you don’t think you have the time, I–”

“No no!” Susan interrupted.  “Listen, Luce, I… I said it'd be hard.  I didn't… I didn't say no.”  Lucy didn’t quite understand why Susan was faltering over her words so much.  “Of course I want to do it.  What a … an amazing gift. Why … Why me?”

Lucy snorted.  “You can play Flight of the Bumblebee drunk  _ and _ blindfolded.  Who else am I going to ask?”

Susan grinned.  “OK, that happened  _ once _ . And it was not exactly a concert-quality performance.  I don’t understand why anyone is still talking about that.”

Lucy folded her arms.  “Because you played Flight of the Bumblebee drunk and blindfolded.”

Susan shrugged.  “Yeah, I did.”  She grinned.  “Alright.  Yeah.  Sure.  I'd be honored to do it.”

Alura came striding into the living room from the kitchen.  “Honored to do what?”

Lucy looked up at Alura.  “Well, Susan here has graciously agreed to my hairbrained idea which I hope you will appreciate and be excited about, which is … she is going to sit down with you and work out some of those Kryptonian songs you’ve been singing, and arrange them for the piano, and then I’m going to work out doing a good recording, so that you can have it to listen to, anytime you want it.”  She waited expectantly.

Alura’s gaze bounced between the two of them.  

“I would like to hear you play, Susan,” she said finally.  “I’ve been told you’re very talented.”  

Susan shrugged.  “That’s what they say,” she answered.

Lucy snorted.  “False modesty doesn’t suit you, Agent Vasquez.”  She looked at Alura.  “Trust me.  She’s … incredible.”

Alura nodded slowly, a smile crossing her lips.  “It’s a very different system to yours,” she said carefully.  “Do you think you can learn it?”

Lucy chuckled internally.  All you had to do was appeal to Susan’s ego.  

“I can learn anything,” Susan answered confidently.

Alura slowly warmed to this idea, and her smile became broader.  “This was your idea, Lucy?”

Lucy nodded.  She loved seeing Alura’s face lighting up like this.  

“I would be … most grateful.”

Susan nodded.  She turned to Lucy.  “So, Luce.  Saturday?”

“Saturday what?”

“We hit the flea market in Mercado?”

“Why are we doing the flea market in Mercado?”

“Because.  You’ve gotta buy Alura a piano.”

Lucy would have spit out her drink if she had one.  “What?”

“Well, this is going to need a dedicated piano.  Tuning a piano isn’t like tuning a guitar, you don’t just do it in five minutes.  We tune an ax to handle Kryptonian music, we commit ourselves to something.  I can’t give either of mine to the cause.  They’re too expensive and they’ve got too much history attached.  But you get her a decent upright, I’ll tune it and restring it, if necessary, to be the dedicated Kryptonian piano.”  She saw Susan getting visibly excited at this prospect.  

“But isn’t there more room at your place?”

“Yeah, but I need to sit with her to figure out this stuff.  And you guys don’t want to drag yourselves out to my place all the time, do you?”

“Where are you again?”

“The Hills.”

“The DEO doesn’t pay you enough to live in the Hills.”

“Not the nice Hills, the shitty Hills.”

Lucy snorted.  “Whatever, you’re right, it’s too far.”

Susan nodded.  “Yeah.  So.  There’s always a guy with a couple of pianos out at Mercado, we can go down together, I’ll help you pick out the right one.  I know you’re picturing a baby grand, Luce, but it doesn’t need to be.  It can be an upright.  You can tuck it in that corner of the living room, you just gotta move that stuffed chair out of the way.”

Lucy surrendered.  “Okay.”

It was happening.  Lucy Lane, who had not a musical bone in her body, was going piano shopping.


	4. Song of Gratitude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Susan shows she cares through aggressive piano shopping and the intense task of learning Kryptonian music.
> 
> Alura shows her feelings through cooking.
> 
> Lucy begins to meditate on what love really is and what family really means.

**Song of Gratitude**

Oh, we have been granted abundance by you  
Oh, Rao, you have given us all that we need and more!  
We have been given the world itself,  
And the sky, and your light,  
And the genius to perfect ourselves  
To become ever closer to the perfect image of you.

Thank you, Rao!  You have given us so much!  
You have given us the beauty of this world,  
It’s sparkling minerals and dark seas and  
Its beasts and Rao, you have given us one another.

Rejoice!  We rejoice in the beauty of your creation  
As we strive to perfect it.  
We rejoice in the love that you have taught us,  
The bonds of family and blood and the  
Beauty of these strands of genetic code that  
Bind us as filaments strong and delicate,  
Family, clan, community, world.

We rejoice! For the beauty of your light,  
For the aches and pains of existence,  
For its love,  
For teaching us selflessness, and force of will.  
And beauty, so much beauty,  
That we can only fall upon our knees in the  
Glittering soil and give thanks.

  


**ALURA**

Susan had shown up to Lucy and Alura’s apartment at seven that morning, wearing almost identical khaki pants and light-colored tank tops to what Alura and Lucy already had on.  “Well, one of us is gonna have to change,” she joked.

And now, Alura walked through the brick-paved lot where the flea market happened, the early morning breezes mild and Lucy’s weight leaning a little on her arm.  Lucy insisted she didn't need any help, so Alura insisted that she just wanted to be close to her.  “I need to hold onto you,” she pressed, “or else I might float away into the pale sky.”

She saw Susan chuckle silently in her peripheral vision.  

They passed rows of vendors selling nearly everything from clothing (“it's mostly knockoffs,” Lucy grunted) to wooden furniture to live rabbits.  Alura gasped at how small and silky they looked.  “No,” Lucy said firmly.  “No rabbits.  Our place is small enough as it is.”

“But their ears…” Alura pleaded.

“You're getting a piano today,” Lucy reminded her.

Alura frowned, but abandoned the idea.  

At the end of a long row of stalls, they saw the man in question.  He sat on a beat-up wooden bench, and beside him sat three upright pianos of varying size and condition.

Lucy pointed to a black one that seemed to be in good repair, with not much in the way of chipped finish or scratches, or other wear and tear.  “How much is this one?”

“Five hundred,” said the grey-headed man, scratching behind his ear with a pencil point as he spoke.  “It's a good instrument.”

“You've gotta be kidding me, Derek,” Susan snorted.  “I wouldn't take this thing if _you_ gave _me_ five hundred.”

He looked at Susan and grinned.  “Well, Suze, it’s not really for someone like you.  It’s more of a starter piano.”  He gestured at it.  “It's in good condition.”

Susan dropped onto the bench in front and Alura watched in awe as her fingers flew over the keys, playing something that pounded, bubbled, soared up and down the black and white keys.  But Susan was frowning.  She played several hard stabs in the deeper notes.  “You've got a nasty growl in this thing at 60 hertz.”  She played a bit in the higher registers.  “And an ugly rattle at 2k.”

Alura looked on with fascination.  Susan was right of course.  The language Susan used to describe the issues was peculiar to Alura’s ear, but she heard the oddities in those frequencies too.  Alura had not yet run into a regular human who could discern these things.  Good ears, indeed.

He grinned.  “But the midrange is clear.”

“Yeah.  So is broken glass.”  She glanced at the other two pianos, not looking thrilled.  “You got anything higher end than this?”

He laughed.  “I’ve got a Lester for three grand back at the shop, but people don’t come to the flea market to spend three grand on a piano.”

Susan nodded.  She looked at the piano to her right, built of worn-looking, pale wood.  She slid over to it.  “What about this Baldwin?”

Derek shrugged.  “Seven fifty.  But it needs work. The tone’s a little weird, definitely not for everyone.  It’s old.  Couple of sticky keys.  Probably could use new strings.”  

Susan spread her fingers out and played a single, thick, ringing chord.  The tones that emanated from the piano’s depths were strange, reverberant, dreamlike.  It was almost shocking how different a voice it had from the first one.  It could almost have been an entirely different instrument.  “Interesting,” was all Susan said.  “I don’t care about the strings or the sticky keys.  I’m going to be working on it myself anyway.”  

And then her fingers began to fly over the keys again, quickly putting the instrument through its paces.  She played something beautiful and dissonant and foreign that made Alura’s breath stop for just a moment.

“It needs a few new hammers, too,” Susan observed, her gaze seeming to be turned inward as her fingers stroked easily and firmly over the keys.  “I hear some mushy notes.”

“I have ‘em.  But you gotta put ‘em on yourself.”

“Fine.  Six fifty, not seven fifty.”

“You’re killing me, Suze.”

“Six fifty,” Susan repeated, continuing to play whatever achingly beautiful tune she was wringing forth from the keys.

Derek relented.  “Fine.”

  


_***************_

 

_Alura remembered the first moment that she had felt something that was clearly, inarguably romantic love for Lucy.  It had been a small moment, a shared laugh, surprising and clear and ringing, as Lucy suddenly grasped a joke that Alura had been trying to explain for weeks without success.  But she was laughing.  And Alura had made her laugh.  Alura didn’t need to know more than that.  This one, she thought, this one is special.  This one, I must keep close to me.  This one, I must share my most secret things with, and gaze upon her face as often and as long as I am allowed to._

_This one, she fills a gap I did not even know I had._

_It was strange and new to feel this.  Marriages on Krypton were not based in the kind of fanciful romantic love that the humans seemed to prefer.  They were predetermined long before one’s birth.  They were rational.  They were suitable.  They were … suddenly, woefully inadequate.  Why would one settle for a life with someone who made them feel anything less than this… this curiosity, this excitement, this comfort, this care, this tenderness, this friendship, this… this jewel that Alura could only call love because what else could it possibly be?_

_She recognized this feeling now, and many others besides._

  


_************************_

  


Two hours later, the piano was sitting in the corner of the living room.  Kara had come by to help them get it upstairs, since Susan was adamant about the need for it to be handled carefully, and kept balanced at all times if it could be helped.  “I’m sure if it was just a matter of weight,” she assured Alura, “you could just haul the damn thing up on your back, but we need to treat it gently.”

Kara had seemed amused at the whole thing, though Alura couldn’t quite figure out why.  Maybe it was the spectacle of them, mother and daughter, carefully carrying a piano up the stairs without sweating.

After she had departed, Susan parked in front of the piano and began to put it through another series of complex, rippling pieces of music.  Alura stood a few feet back, humbled by the skill on display, watching Susan’s hands fluttering effortlessly over the instrument, seeming to cover every last inch of it, every last key.  She watched the tilt of her head, the play of the muscles in her shoulders.  She was working, Alura observed, but it was work she clearly reveled in.  The instrument’s voice was unique; curiously ethereal, with a strange boominess that she found she loved.  She understood now what Astra meant about the humans’ music being something that one felt in the body, not just the soul.  Alura felt each of Susan’s confident arpeggios cascading down the back of her neck, each of these runs that bubbled upwards from the lowest end of the instrument reverberating in her belly.  She would have to remember to share this with her sister.

Lucy stood beside her, resting her head against Alura’s shoulder, seeming equally awed.

“What do you call that music?” Alura asked softly, once Susan had stopped playing.

Susan looked up and smiled.  “That’s Tchaikovsky.  Piano Concerto No. 1.”

Alura shook her head.  “Wonderful.”

Susan nodded.  “One of my favorites.  It’s a good one for putting your hands all over an instrument and getting to know it.”

Alura ventured a little closer.  “So… now what?”

Susan got up.  “Now, the fun begins,” she announced, with a wicked gleam in her eye.

She opened her backpack and took out a number of items.  The set of strings that Derek had sold them along with the piano, a large notebook, a small, flat toolbox.  She flipped open the top of the piano, and then opened her notebook and left it open beside her to a spread, drawn across two pages, with a number of lines and incomprehensible glyphs.

“What’s that?” Lucy asked.  

“Ah,” Susan chuckled.  “I listened to the little bit of Kryptonian music -- well, a lot of it--  in the AI this week and mapped out what the scales had to be, and then figured out what would correspond to the piano and how I was going to need to tune it to be able to do what I needed to do with it.  Multiple polyharmonic, microtonal scales.  You Kryptonians weren’t playing around, were you.”

Alura inclined her head.  “I’m sorry for ever questioning your abilities.”

“Well,” Susan answered with light mischief, “I did feel a little judged, if you must know.”

Alura smirked.  “That _is_ my … thing,” she replied after a moment.

She and Lucy wandered in and out of the room while Susan worked, over the next several hours, bringing the piano into alignment with the tuning map that she had drawn up in her notebook.  She was delicate and precise with the tools, despite lamenting that many of the instrument’s internal workings were not especially cooperative.  “You guys are gonna have to run a dehumidifier in here,” she warned at one point as she worked the lightly swollen felt of a stuck key, gently, squeezing and compressing it until it was moving freely again.

Lucy offered her a beer, but Susan declined politely, as she needed to keep her head clear while she worked.  

Some strings she simply retuned, some she swapped entirely for new ones because she had to change the tunings too much for the string to sound natural anymore, or for the tension of the string to be proper for its position within the instrument.  Alura brought her drinks of water, Lucy brought her snacks, and then the two of them insisted quite firmly that it was time to break for lunch, which Alura put together: grilled salmon with salad and a light, lemony couscous.

Susan ate appreciatively, remarking, “Lucy, you’re lucky to have your arm in that cast now.  Alura’s on cooking duty.”

Lucy laughed out loud.  “No, Alura’s always on cooking duty.  I’m hopeless.  I’ve had bowls of cereal burst into flames in front of me.”

After lunch, Susan returned to work.  Alura and Lucy drifted in and out of the room, occasionally drifting over to her hunched form, making sure she had everything she needed.  Once, Alura insisted on massaging a knot out of her shoulder, and later, Lucy worked a cramp out of her hand.  Finally, Susan stood up, closed the top of the piano, and announced, “If it’s not ready, I’m going to jump out of that window.”

“That would be pointless,” Lucy countered, “because Alura would catch you.”

Susan smirked.  She sat down on the bench, and gestured for Alura to come sit beside her.  “Can you sing me that one, the one that goes…?”  And the she tapped out a bit of a melody that was so familiar that Alura’s heart nearly leapt out of her chest.  

“Of course.”  And she closed her eyes, and she sang in Kryptonese, the lyrics to one of her most favorite hymns, and after a moment, Susan was accompanying her, picking up the harmonies and countermelodies with the piano’s dreamlike voice.

When the last notes faded away, the three of them sat in silence for a moment.  Alura felt the weight of a hundred beautiful memories, a hundred thousand moments of having felt the presence of Rao in her life and soul.  This universe, it was so big, but he had brought her to this place, to these two humans, who had gifted her with the feeling of returning to herself again.  Her eyes warmed and filled with tears that didn’t trouble herself to wipe away.

Lucy clutched at her hand.  

“What do those words mean?” Susan asked, and Alura could hear a reverence in her tone, because she understood that she had given something far greater than she even expected.

And so, Alura told her the words in English to the Song of Gratitude.

  
  


**LUCY**

Nobody in that room had been fully prepared for what it would mean to Alura to hear the hymns of her people performed for her by a master like Susan.  Lucy suspected that Susan had had some inkling from the very beginning, though, and that that was why she stumbled over her words when Lucy had asked her about it.  

Alura pulled Susan to her feet and embraced her, the way humans did, and thanked her several times, effusively praising her playing, her understanding of the Kryptonian scales, her sensitivity, and all of the work that she had put in to make this happen.

Susan looked nearly as emotional as Alura did, and she returned Alura’s embrace.  Lucy struggled to articulate just how pleased she was with this entire thing; she was pleased to have been part of giving this gift to Alura, pleased to see how much Susan cared for them both (because not only did she give her entire day to finding and then tuning and repairing the instrument, but apparently a good bit of her week to breaking down the scales and planning the retuning of 88 keys), and pleased to see Alura so happy.  Pleased to see Susan so deeply emotional, too.  

It had been fascinating watching Susan work on the piano; she was like a surgeon.  With the piano splayed open and its inner workings visible, she was exquisite, exacting.  Her focus was intent, but not overheated, and ear was accurate to degree that Lucy could barely hear.  Even when she encountered something difficult, a tuning peg that was sticking and wouldn’t budge, she was deliberate, only applying enough force to get the job done.  

And then on a dime, she could turn around and play a completely alien piece of music on an instrument that she essentially designed herself, and play it with sensitivity and feeling that left the three of them damn near weeping.

 _What the fuck, Susan?_ Lucy thought, both annoyed and amused.   _How dare you make us all feel feelings?_

But Lucy had always suspected that Susan was extraordinary.  Lucy had always wanted to be closer to her than she was, know her better than she did.  And now she had proven her instincts right.

So the three of them embraced, and Lucy murmured her own thanks, and Alura muttered hers, and everyone was making not particularly strenuous efforts to hold back the tears that pricked at the corners of their eyes.

“Do you want a beer now?” Lucy offered, pulling back from their group hug.  “You sure as hell earned it.”  She glanced out the window.  The sun was sinking behind the dark hulks of buildings, bleeding warm orange light into the living room.  Susan had been with them all day, making this happen.  Lucy didn’t know what she could do to thank her but she was going to have to think of something.  

Susan nodded vigorously.  Lucy went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of Red Stripe, because she’d remembered that that was Susan’s drink, and a bottle opener.  “Can’t quite manage opening it for you with the–”  She held up her bad hand.

Susan snorted.  “Excuses, excuses.”  She popped the bottle open.  

Alura smiled at them both.  “Susan, please make yourself comfortable.  I’m going to start dinner.”

Lucy accompanied Alura into the kitchen while Susan stretched herself out on the couch.  She placed her hand on the small of her back.  “I hope that you–”

Alura turned and put a finger to Lucy’s lips.  “This was a wonderful idea, my love.  You could not have chosen someone better than Susan.  And I could not have chosen someone better than you.”  She leaned down and kissed her, and Lucy sighed, and then Alura said sternly, “Now go back and keep her company.  I don’t need your help in here.”

Lucy laughed.  “You sure don’t.”  She fetched herself a beer from the refrigerator, which Alura opened for her, and then went back into the living room and sat down on the couch next to Susan.

“Thanks for asking me to do this,” Susan began.  Lucy could see she was exhausted, but in good spirits.

“I’m the one who should be thanking you,” Lucy protested.

“Yeah, but… I haven’t challenged myself in a long time,” Susan answered.  “I’ve been going for the safe thing, the easy thing.  This was … rewarding.  And it’s just the beginning.”

Lucy realized that Susan had already torn through a lot of that beer.  She wondered whether Susan had Erin on her mind tonight, after finding herself in such a deeply emotional moment.  But she didn’t speak Erin’s name.  “I’m glad.  I mean … you took my idea and turned into this… this incredible thing…”  She paused, worked on her own beer a little.  “...I know this was huge for her, but… I can’t tell you how much it means to me, too.”

Susan grinned and downed some more of her beer.  “Don’t go getting all mushy on me, ma’am.”

“Hardly, Agent.”  

They relaxed together, and Lucy started asking questions about the legitimately fascinating process that Susan had undertaken to figure out what the scales were and how she was going to map them on the retuned piano.  Then they talked about wrestling.  Lucy got them more beers.  They talked about football and then politics and then gossipped about J’onn and Alex and Winn a bit.  And then at the bottom of her third beer, Lucy was realizing that she was for some reason very tired too, and she drifted off into a soft, beery unconsciousness.

  


*********

  


_When Lucy had first realized she was falling in love with Alura, it was a seemingly insignificant moment.  They were walking home from Kara’s apartment and it had started raining, and Alura had absently reached over and turned Lucy’s collar up against the weather.  It had been instinctive.  She hadn’t thought about it.  She’d just done it._

_And at that moment, it occurred to Lucy that there had been a thousand million of these gentle gestures of caring, these small things that were unremarkable except for their sheer volume, for their consistency, their frequency.  Alura was giving her love, in the ways that she knew how, and Lucy had not the heart to refuse it when she, too,  had been giving love without even realizing it, in so many of the same ways._

_It had taken them a long time to tell each other that they loved each other.  It was strange for Lucy, because Kara was so demonstrative.  But Alura was from another culture and loving someone this way was a new experience for her.  She had not had the words for it.  It was no small miracle, actually, that when Lucy finally told her, in a soft, almost frightened whisper, “Alura, please don’t be angry with me, because I’ve tried not to do this, but… I think I’ve fallen in love with you,” that Alura smiled.  Took her hands.  Whispered back, “I have never felt about anyone the way I feel about you.  If that is love, then I believe I have also fallen.”_

_It had never been sweeter, more gentle, more innocent with anyone._

_Lucy recalled that at first Susan had greeted her with suspicion when she began at the DEO.  Understandable, given her history.  It occurred to Lucy that not long after she sat beside Susan at the pub, asking all those questions about her piano playing, that something changed.  That Susan became the first to volunteer to cover her in the field.  That Susan had been sincerely supportive and happy for her upon learning that she was having a thing with Supergirl’s mom.   That Susan, without being asked, simply, quietly had her back._

_She wondered what things would be like if she had not met Alura._

  


**********************

  


Lucy stirred.  Her head felt thick.  She smelled something incredible coming from the kitchen.  Ah, yes.  That’s right.  She lived with a beautiful woman from another planet who had become infatuated with human food and cooked like it was her mission in life.  And she allowed Lucy to go sit and have beers with their guest while she did.

She yawned.  Her head felt warm.  She had dreamed things she couldn’t remember.  She turned her head to the side, and opened her eyes, and saw Susan, looking drowsily back at her.  Lucy’s eyes drooped closed for a moment.  She pushed them open again.  Yep.  Still Susan.

“Hey.”

Susan’s lips curled in a little half-smile.  “Hey.”

They spent a minute looking at each other while Lucy tried to remember what they were doing.   _We had a big moment,_ Lucy thought. _Something big happened._

“Smells incredible,” Susan mumbled.

Lucy nodded and yawned.  “Yeah.”  Her head cleared a little.  “Alura’s cooking.”

Susan continued smiling at her.

Lucy wished she’d stop it.  Susan’s sleepy smile was sweeter than it had a right to be.  “What?” she finally demanded with a little frown.

“Luce?”

“What??”

“Why are you holding my hand?”

Lucy looked down and realized that at some point in their napping, their hands had become tangled together, their fingers loosely interlaced.  “Please,” she snorted, trying to keep the color from her cheeks.  “ _You_ are obviously holding _my_ hand.”

Susan rubbed her eyes.  “Don’t let it go to your head, ma’am.”

“As if, Agent.” Lucy yawned back.

“Dinner is ready,” Alura announced gently from the doorway.

Lucy suddenly sat up straight.  Fuck.  Alura.  She was holding hands with Susan.  This was bad, wasn’t it.

But Alura looked amused.  “You two have been holding hands in your sleep for the last thirty minutes.  Dinner has been ready for at least twenty, but I couldn’t bear to wake you.”  Her eyes sparkled merrily.  “You’re both blushing, as I knew you would when you realized.  Now come and eat, please.  This asopao isn’t going to devour itself.”

  


**SUSAN**

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Susan muttered as she dug into the food that Alura had set in front of her.  The asapao was thick and savory, and she could taste the garlic, the sofrito, the deep, tangy alcaparrado that could not have come from a jar but had to have been made fresh.  She could taste the ham, shredded fine the way her mother made it.  “This is incredible.”

Alura smiled, pleased with herself.  “Is it as good as your mother’s?”

Susan nodded, her mouth full.  The fact was, it was spot on.  It was not like any other asopao that she’d ever had at someone else’s house growing up, or at any restaurant.  It was exactly like her mother’s.  “It’s … yeah,” she admitted, awed.  “It’s... actually exactly like hers.  Right down to the annatto oil, I can taste it.  It’s… it’s perfect.”

Alura sighed with relief. “Good.  Then you will have to tell her that the recipe was successful.”

Susan peered at her with confusion.  “What?”

“I called her.”

Susan dropped her spoon.  “You did what?”

Alura shrugged.  “Lucy did not know what your favorite food was.  So l called your mother.  I had learned Spanish in the pod as well as English, in case I were to have landed somewhere that spoke Spanish.  Since you had mentioned your mother’s preference for Spanish, I employed what I knew to inquire after your favorite meal and ask for the recipe.”

Susan gaped.

Lucy was laughing her ass off.

Alura was simply smiling a broad, dazzling smile.  

“What … what did you say to her?”

“I told her I was a friend of yours.  That you were doing me a great favor and I wished to prepare your favorite meal in thanks.”

Susan nodded slowly, and shoveled another mouthful of warm, savory, comfortingly gluey rice into her mouth.  After spending a moment dwelling in the emotional memories that the flavors and textures of it evoked in her, she thought to inquire, “What did _she_ say?”

Alura continued smiling.  “She said my Spanish was better than yours.”

Lucy snorted and almost spit her drink.

Susan shook her head, laughing.  “I can’t believe you.”  And she continued eating.  

Alura sat, and for a moment, the three of them ate in rapturous silence.  Susan was enjoying a moment of nostalgia, a flavor that rang every bell in her heart, that tasted like more like home and family than anything else on Earth.  Lucy and Alura were enjoying something brand new, that they had never tasted before, that was made more treasured for the simple fact that it was special to Susan.  

“This is incredible,” Susan said again.  

“Amazing,” Lucy added.

A few more quiet moments passed.  Then Susan suddenly demanded, “Wait.  So what other languages did you learn in the pod?  All of them?”

Alura laughed, as though the idea was absurd.  “No, of course not all of them.  Just English, Spanish, French, Mandarin and Arabic.”

Susan shook her head and kept eating, because all she could think of to say was, “Holy shit,” and that seemed pretty inadequate under the circumstances.

“Don’t worry,” Lucy assured her, chuckling, “I’m still not used it.”

  
  


********

 

_“What do you mean?”_

_Susan had been shocked that her parents were refusing to pay for Berklee.  She thought they had understood that music was all there was for her._

_“We’re proud of your talent,” her father had said gently, “and it will help you get into some very good schools, but you must know that you need to actually go to school for something practical.”_

_They wouldn't go so far as to forbid her from going to Berklee if she got in (which of course she did), but they wouldn't pay for it.  “And what happens,” her mother demanded, “when you realize in a few years that you can't support yourself this way?”_

_“Have you seen me play??” Susan wanted to scream.  “Do you even know me??”_

_So she got a partial scholarship to Berklee, and that helped.  She scared up a few grants and took out a few loans and worked tuning pianos and a few hours a week at the nearby cafe, but after two years, with no help from her parents, she was too deep in a hole and couldn't afford to keep going._

_Her parents had offered to pay for her to come home and go to U of C for something that she could “fall back on,” but then J’onn had found her, and everything had changed._

  


********

 

In the weeks that followed, Susan spent at least two evenings a week at Lucy and Alura’s place.  She would make sure the piano was holding its idiosyncratic tuning, then Alura would teach her another song, and Susan would pick at it, and usually by the end of the evening, Susan would have something worked out for it that she and Alura would perform together, while Lucy listened with her eyes closed.  Alura would cook dinner and Lucy and Susan would watch sports on television or talk about work, or family, or something else.  It felt comfortably domestic, and Susan always felt a little pang of sadness when she had to leave at the end of the night.  She’d fall asleep thinking about Lucy’s laugh, or Alura’s voice singing something, clear and high as a lark.

Privately, Alura would tell Susan that her even-tempered presence seemed to have a positive effect on Lucy’s moods and emotional states.  

Privately, Lucy would tell Susan that Alura seemed happier and more whole than she had ever seen her and that no thanks on this earth seemed truly adequate.

Susan told them of how she used to participate in aikido exhibitions all the time.  Lucy began encouraging her to do them again.  “I’ve always been impressed with your skills,” she said, “I think you should do them again.  People could learn from watching you.”

So, when Susan wasn’t at their piano, she was training with Sensei Mori, and sometimes Lucy and Alura would stop by to watch her train.  She felt she performed better when they were there.  She wanted them to see her at her best.

And the songs.  Dear Jesus, the songs.  Alura would translate the words as she taught her each one.  She began to feel them:  The Song of Gratitude, The Song of Remembrance, The Song of Reconciliation… she may not have been a follower of Rao, but there was beauty in those hymns, beauty in appealing to the the divine for help with these simple, precious concepts:  remembering one’s duty, mending one’s family and community ties, striving to perfect oneself.  Susan had left Catholicism by the roadside at a bus stop in Connecticut fifteen years ago, but she appreciated the sentiments of Alura’s faith, on more than one level.  When combined with the experience of learning this complex, new music system… she felt… elevated.  She felt herself expanding and growing.

It had been weeks since she thought of Erin.

And finally, it was no small thing that Lucy was indulging her pursuit of this side project with the signal.  She composed a new phrase, tacked it onto the end of the old phrase, and beamed it out via GIDEON as they’d discussed.  Twice it came back, repeating her addition and then adding something else.  It was starting to feel intentional.  It was starting to feel like communication.

Maybe it was nothing.  Maybe it would go nowhere. Or, maybe she was just jamming with some invisible aliens, and that alone was a hell of a thing to have on your CV.  She was exploring the stars, in her own little way.

Interesting, she thought, what a support system did for one’s confidence.


	5. Song of Bonding

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hold onto your butts, this is a long, dense chapter and a lot happens:
> 
> They each continue to grow in their own ways, and become closer together.
> 
> Astra confronts Alura about the direction of the relationship.
> 
> Lucy puts up with Alex's shit to get some useful advice.
> 
> Lucy and Alura realize that they're on the same page when it comes to Susan and what they both want.
> 
> Susan makes a rash decision.

**Song of Bonding  
** We have been chosen for each other  
And the choice is perfect.  
We have been made for one another before  
We were even born into the world,  
Sculpted from the perfect design of Rao’s inspiration.

We have been chosen for each other  
Made to belong together in the image provided for us  
And slowly we turn until we see the edges  
Where we fit.

Oh take me by the arms and sing with me  
The songs of Rao’s love.  
We have been chosen for each other and now  
We knit ourselves together in common cause,  
In familial love,  
In the bonds of a plan more perfect  
Than any one mind could conceive.

We have been made to balance one another  
For our strengths to complement one another’s weakness  
Because Rao’s love is perfect  
And in his honor we strive to love another as perfectly as that.  
Where I fall down, you will lift me up,  
And where you stumble, I will hold you steady.  
We were chosen for each other before our lives began,  
And our choice is perfect.  
We were made to fit together  
To cleave to one another, leaving no space in between.  


**ALURA**

Weeks continued to pass.  Lucy’s arm finally came out of its cast.  Their time with Susan continued to increase, until it became so that they were together in their free hours more often than they were not.  They occasionally visited Susan’s comparatively spacious place in the Hills, to swim and barbecue and enjoy her playing some of her human music.  Alura helped her practice Spanish while they cooked together and Lucy made margaritas or daiquiris, mixed so strong that Alura could almost swear that even she was affected by the alcohol in them.

She loved listening to Susan talk excitedly about her ongoing exchange of musical phrases with the mysterious signal, whose origins were as yet unknown.  “I sent out a bar of Rachmaninoff,” she would exclaim, “I can’t wait to see what they send back, based on that.”  

Their energies mingled and felt right together.  Alura and Susan played and sang in the evenings.  Alura often came to the gym and watched her and Lucy sparring.  Susan had convinced Lucy to help her give a demonstration of aikido’s effectiveness against the Army combative style.  It made her heart thrill to watch them displaying their grace and strength against one another, to observe the contrast in their styles.  The Army drills were so much more full-contact than the graceful Aikido, which was like dance to Alura’s eyes.  She got an odd flutter in her stomach when they would begin a drill with Lucy sitting on top of Susan, challenging her to get out from under, and a flush in her cheeks when Susan would manage to do it.

By this time, Susan had arranged and learned enough of the hymns that they could almost conduct a real service.  Alura invited Astra over to join them for such an evening.

Astra, too, seemed visibly moved as they sang through the Songs of Remembrance, Reconciliation, Gratitude, Guidance, Loss, and Bonding.  “They are the songs of our faith,” she wondered aloud to Alura afterwards, “and yet she has given them something so… human.”

Alura nodded.  “Do you see now?  As you have said of other human music, I feel them not only in my soul but in my body as well.”

The corner of Astra’s mouth lifted, but she appeared to be holding back.  She only said, “Indeed.  She has a gift.  You are fortunate that she has shared it with you.”

Lucy and Susan came in from the kitchen bearing four beers.  They distributed them and drank.

Lucy glanced at the wall clock.  “The game is starting in a little bit.  Astra, would you like to stay and watch the Padres game?”

Astra smiled politely.  “Ah, sportsball.”

“Baseball,” Alura corrected.

Astra smirked again.  “They have trained you well.”

Alura gave her a raised eyebrow.  “Stay for a little,” she implored.

Astra sighed and relented.  “Only for a bit.”  She lowered herself into the stuffed chair, which had been wedged beside the piano.  Alura, Susan and Lucy settled into the couch, and Lucy flicked on the television.  The distant roar of the TV crowd blanketed the room.  “I understand the precision involved in this game,” Astra remarked quietly to Alura, who was seated on the end, “but I find it difficult to get excited as they do.”

Alura smiled indulgently at Lucy and Susan, who were seated on the other side of her.  “Me too.  But, they do enjoy it.  So, I am learning.”

Alura settled in.  Lucy was in the middle, and Susan on the other side of her.  After half an inning, they had relaxed into one another, Susan’s head on Lucy’s shoulder, and Lucy leaning back against Alura.  Alura’s hand was draped over the arm of the couch, holding onto Astra’s.  

At the end of the inning, Astra stood and announced, “I must go.  It has been a pleasure and an honor.  Susan,” she added, nodding toward her, “our ancestors would be pleased with what you have done with the songs of our faith.”

Susan nodded humbly.  “I’m glad to hear that.”

Alura walked Astra to the door.  They embraced, and Astra pulled back, and took her by the shoulder.  “Sister,” she said quietly, “you are aware of what is happening, are you not?”

Alura was confused.

Astra saw her look and chuckled silently to herself.  “You are becoming three instead of two.”

Alura’s heart skipped for a moment.  Could it be?  She shook her head.  “No, that is not… it could not be…”

Astra gave her a sympathetic look, and stroked her cheek.  “Of course it could.  Perhaps it is too hard for you to see it, but to me, it is obvious.  You have a balance to your energies.  You seem happier than when you were with Lucy alone.  Search your feelings honestly, and I think you will find that you know what is happening, and that it is what your heart wants.”

They embraced again, and Astra left, and Alura was shivering with a riot of feelings that she couldn’t name.  Astra’s situation was one thing; it was unique amongst all the stars.  She had died and returned from it.  She was a fragment of the souls of legend, as were her two lovers.  How often could such a thing happen?  Surely, it was not the case here.

But then, she wondered, what _was_ the case, actually?

 

**********

 

_Alura had been surprised when she put together what was happening to her all those months ago, that she was feeling the low burn of sexual hunger, and that it was single-minded in its desire for Lucy Lane and no other.  Such urges had been mostly bred out of Kryptonians, though it was said that it remained a recessive gene in some bloodlines.  There wasn’t much urgency about eradicating it altogether, especially where a gene marked a predisposition for same-sex attractions, since those couldn’t result in any unplanned births anyhow.  Nevertheless, she had not suspected that she possessed that trait, as it had lain dormant until that moment, when it could no longer escape her notice._

_She had come upon Lucy at the DEO gym, deadlifting what was clearly a tremendous amount of weight for a small human woman without the benefit of superpowers.  So much skin, she had thought.  Look at the sweat on her, the hundreds on hundreds of little beads of it, she had thought.  The flex of her hard muscle beneath the flesh.  The scent of her body.   The weight of her breaths, in and out of her chest._

_Alura nearly broke the doorjamb in her hand as she felt the ache in her body, and she pressed her thighs together, trying without much success to quell the sudden restless feeling between them as she stared helplessly for a few long moments.  Her body was asking for something it had never asked for before.  It was gripped by an unfamiliar hunger, and it wanted to satisfy that hunger with Lucy Lane.  What that meant, she would not find out in granular detail for a little while yet._

_But since becoming acquainted with the delightful devil called desire, she had quickly learned to recognize it when she felt it fluttering in her pulse, seeking satisfaction._

 

**************************

 

It was a rare evening on which Lucy was working late, occupied with administrative tasks, but Susan was not.  Susan had gone home, claiming to want an early night, but something about that rang false to Alura.  

Alura was feeling hemmed in by the walls of their apartment, and all of the time that they had been spending as a trio left her all the more conscious of her solitude now.  She did not care for it.  After a bit of consideration, she elected to take to the air, to arc across the sky and out of the city, out to the Hills.  She did not know Susan’s address, but she knew her heartbeat, and she had gotten progressively better at focusing on and isolating sounds at great distances.  

The lights were not so dense out here, and the whisper of the palms was clearer where there was not so much traffic.  She followed an artery of red taillights until she reached a neighborhood that felt right.  She saw the luxe mansions to the west, and knew that that was not the part of the Hills where Susan lived.  But here, she saw modest yards, some with swimming pools.  She thought she recognized the block.  

She did not, as it turned out, need to listen for Susan’s heartbeat, because she was playing one of her pianos at that moment.  It was the upright, the one that sat near the kitchen window, the one that Susan played when she was feeling raucous and unrestrained.  Drifting up from that window, Alura could pick out the strains of something she recognized.  She followed the trail of dense, meaty chords down to the rancher that she now knew was Susan’s.  She could see her burgundy car in the driveway, the pool, the patio with the barbecue grill on it.  She drifted down to the kitchen window, which faced onto the backyard, and floated outside of it, letting the notes of what Susan was playing brush over her skin in the cool night.  

Finally, Susan happened to notice her and stop playing.  “Jesus Christ!” she yelped from inside.

Alura flushed.  “I’m sorry,” she apologized hastily.  “It was so compelling, I didn’t wish to interrupt.”

Susan smiled, and as she caught her breath, she thumbed toward the patio.  “Screen door’s open, come on in.”

Alura settled onto the solid ground, and walked across the patio to the screen door.   She heard the piano rumble to life again, Susan playing those heavy, gut-grabbing rhythms that Alura felt were pulling her of their own volition, through the screen doors, into the kitchen.

She kept her footfalls soft, not wanting to break Susan’s rhythm again, and listened.  Those notes, those dissonant notes, the grind and rumble of the lines that her fingers played in the low end of the instrument, they were doing something to Alura.  She couldn’t separate whether it was her heart or her body that was feeling this music so intensely, and it almost didn’t matter.  She drew closer, entranced.

She was sure that she had been told this piece was called “Don’t Blame Me,” authored by a man called Monk.  

 _Blame me for what,_ Alura wondered.

She was caught up in watching the grace of Susan’s arms, the agility of her fingers, and the sound of that note, that note –it had a name, what had Susan called it?  But it didn’t matter now–  watching the music seem to work its way out of Susan’s body and onto the keys.  She drifted closer still.

The music, that note … it was like a sonic manifestation of a physical ache, but a beautiful one, one attuned to the rhythms of the body, and Alura couldn’t help placing a hand on Susan’s shoulder, because she recognized it, ached in sympathy with it.  She heard Susan’s fingers falter for just a moment, felt her heartbeat spike, and then felt her dig harder into the music.

Susan’s skin was smooth, and the muscles beneath it hard, and she felt them flex and release as Susan’s body gave forth the wordless song, wringing it from the keys.  She felt the tightness in her own body increase, as if she were a tensile string to be tuned like the ones in Susan’s instrument.  She wondered what sound she might make if struck.  She felt the little bumps raise on Susan’s skin where the pads of her fingers touched it.  She felt Susan, so human.

The aching, the craving, was pouring out of her, pouring into the song that issued from the piano with perfect, passionate grace.  Alura felt it.  Susan was saying things right now, things that she felt she couldn’t say any other way.  The heat and prickle of her skin was saying it.  The elevated thump of her heartbeat, the sway of her body, the gentle nod of her head as she counted the song’s pulse, the shallowness of her breath was saying it.

The song was saying it.

 _The blue note,_ Alura thought. _She called it the blue note._ And that blue note, it reverberated inside her, rang out against a place of longing inside her, with a deep tone that she had felt before.  This time, she recognized it.  This time, she knew what her body was asking for.

When Susan finished playing, she sat with her head down, chin to her chest, and didn’t speak for a long moment.  Alura was almost afraid to say anything, but finally, Susan turned around.  Alura thought she saw anguish under Susan’s smile.  She could hear that her heart was beating hard.

“I’m sorry,” Alura said quietly.  She took her hand away.  “I distracted you.”

Susan shook her head.  “It’s … it’s alright.  It’s nice to see you.”  A long, uncomfortable silence followed, in which they both would look at each other, then look away a few times.  

“I should have called,” Alura offered after a moment, by way of apology.

Susan shrugged.  “It’s okay.”  And then, after another awkward moment, she said, “But I really do think I … I should go to bed now.  I’m just…  kind of tired.”

Alura knew it was a lie.  

Alura knew that Susan had played those beautiful, blue, aching notes for her.  Astra was right.  Something was happening here.  She was tense as a piano string and she would make a sweet sound if she was struck, but that was not the song that they would play, not tonight.  Not this way.  “I just wanted to hear a bit of your human music,” she said, trying to make her voice sound light but instead sounding wistful, even to her own ears.  “I’ll see you tomorrow, perhaps?”

Susan nodded.  They said goodnight without touching, and Alura left the way she had come in.  How could tell Lucy what she had been feeling?  She had never wanted anyone but Lucy.  The guilt weighed heavy on her shoulders as she flew home.

  


**************************

 

**LUCY**

 

“What do you mean, how did I know?”  Alex demanded.

Lucy sighed.  “I mean, how did you know that the three of you together was the … the thing?  How did you know that that would work?”

Alex laughed.  “We didn’t!  It was just the only way forward.”

Lucy frowned and scratched behind her ear.  “What do you mean?”

“Look, I mean … our situation was impossible.  I was madly in love with Maggie. Then Astra came back from the dead.  I was given a second chance that nobody ever gets.  Maggie and Astra falling for each other kind of solved what was actually a huge problem.”   Long pause with some static in the line.  Then Alex stated, “You want to bring Susan in.”

Lucy sighed.  “Al, I can’t explain it.  Things with Alura were good before this, they were great, even.  I just… it’s not bringing her in if she’s already in.”

“You guys are already sleeping with her?”

“No!”  Lucy exclaimed.  “I just mean, she’s… emotionally, she’s in.   We’re something more, something better, when she’s around.  And lately she’s around all the time.  And … Alura is less sad.  She’s going out of the house a lot more.  She’s even flying sometimes!  You _know_ she never really liked having powers.”

Alex chuckled.  “OK, OK.  I had to ask.  But look… do you think Susan would be good with that?”

Lucy sighed.  “I don’t know.  I mean, we were sparring the other day, and she pinned me down, and I swear, I thought she was gonna kiss me.  And I kind of hoped she would!”

Alex was laughing now.

“And I’ve seen her have moments like that with Alura, too, where they were at the piano together and it seemed like something was going to… you know…. But then, no.”

Alex was full-on cackling now.

“Will you cut it out?” Lucy snapped.

Alex calmed down after a moment.  “I’m sorry.  Listen.  My situation was really, really different than yours.  I don’t know what to tell you about what’s going to work or not, for you guys.  I do know Susan always had a little thing for you, so, there’s that.  And I honestly can’t imagine anyone looking at Astra or Alura and saying, ‘hmm, nah, pass.’  But I don’t know Susan like you do, these days.”

There was a long quiet while Lucy mulled this over.

“Do you love her?”

“Who?”

Alex snorted.  “I know you love Alura, you’ve been uselessly gay for her since about her second week on Earth.  But I mean, Susan.  Do you love her?  Or do you only love the function she serves in your relationship with Alura?”

Lucy paused, taken aback by the question.  She had never considered it from that angle.  

“Because,” Alex went on, “Rosensweig made me consider that before I pursued a relationship with the two of them.  You don’t all necessarily have to be on the same page but you do have to know what page you’re actually on, and be honest about that.”

Lucy was left with a lot to consider.

 

**********

 

_Lucy was fresh off of her breakup with James when she’d invited Susan out for drinks, along with Alex and a few other of the cohort from the DEO.  She wasn’t looking for it to be a date.  It was under the pretense of celebrating the success of Winn’s efforts at making the crashed two-man Kyrian cruiser operational again.  That would open up a lot of possibilities for the DEO, having such a craft on hand.  It wasn’t good for long space flight, but had none of the limitations that pods did in terms of how much control you had during flights._

_The truth was, though, it was just an excuse to go drink, and not have to do it alone.  She was too disappointed with the way things had gone with James, that he hadn’t been strong enough to admit that he wanted Kara more than her, and had made her do the breaking up for him.  She had walked out of that relationship knowing that she was never going to put up with being someone’s second choice again._

_She had also walked out of it knowing that she would never, if she could help it, ever put someone in the position of feeling that they were_ her _second choice, because it was a rotten feeling._

_Susan wasn’t especially talkative that night.  Lucy remarked on it at one point.  “I’m more of a listener,” Susan had said with a wry smile._

_But Lucy discovered that she appreciated that about her.  For once, it was nice to have to actually ask someone about themselves instead of listening to them tell you everything you didn’t ask and didn’t care about.  And that when you did get her talking, she had thoughtful, interesting things to say.  She found she liked Susan’s quiet smile, that she could do with seeing more of it.  It was a good thing she’d mentioned her romantic intentions to Alex, because Alex had happened to know that Susan had just begun dating Erin, and was very excited about her._

_Lucy remembered how heart sank when she’d heard that information._

_No, she thought.  There had always been something about Susan.  And now that she was closer to her, she knew what it was._

 

*********

 

Lucy and Alura were tangled together on the couch, their fingers fumbling at each other’s clothes.  They were hot, moving against each other with such a sweet, hungry urgency that they might not end up bothering to get all of their clothing completely off.  It happened that way sometimes.  This had been a busy week, and it had been difficult to find energy and time to make love in the soft, unhurried way that they liked to do.  So they found themselves now, kissing hotly, not even getting up to move their activities into the bedroom, touching each other through their clothes because buttons just felt like too much work and they were more than a little impatient.  They would eventually move to the bed and have sex again, more slowly, savoring each other the way they liked to do, but first, they needed to have each other and it was too urgent a matter to trouble themselves with anything that delayed their satisfaction.

“Mm,” Alura was sighing, “I’ve missed this.”

“Hm, me too,” Lucy agreed, finally giving up on Alura’s buttons and simply sliding her hands up underneath her shirt, giving a happy little gasp when she reached up and her fingers brushed skin.  “No bra,” she commented in between kisses, pleased at the find.

“Yes,” Alura confirmed.  “It didn’t seem fair to make you work too hard.”

“I think you’re just impatient,” Lucy answered, mumbling around kisses.  Her fingers delighted themselves in tracing over the perfect swell of Alura’s breast, over the stiffening peaks of her nipples.  

“I am,” Alura concurred, and then whatever else she was going to say got lost in a series of little gasps at what Lucy was doing with her fingers.

Things got a lot less verbal after that.

Lucy let Alura know what she wanted by taking Alura’s hand and placing it exactly where she wanted it.  Alura had very considerately opted for no undergarments at all, this evening, Lucy discovered.  She ended up flopped half on top of Alura, each with a hand in each other’s pants, sighing and kissing and cursing a little, stroking each other, grinding against each other.  She felt her pleasure gathering, coalescing into a white-hot star between her legs as she rubbed herself against Alura’s fingers, and felt Alura’s warmth against her own.  

“Mm,” she whispered through thick breaths, “you feel close.”

“Yes,” Alura whispered back.  “Are you?”

“Yeah,” Lucy whispered.  “Oh, fuck…”

Their quiet moans increased in frequency as they drew closer to orgasm, punctuated with soft swearing (she loved reducing Alura to cursing in Kryptonese, even though she didn’t know what exactly she was saying).  

_Oh, yes… fuck, yes…_

_Don’t stop …_

_I love you…_

_… Oh, Rao …_

_...Yes… oh, God…._

And then at the same moment, both them uttered:

_...Susan…_

Lucy stopped.  She was horrified until she realized that it hadn’t only come from her mouth, but from Alura’s as well.  They froze, staring at each other, unable to decide for a moment how to react to it.

Lucy began cautiously, “Did you just…?”

Alura bit her lip, looking wary.  “Yes … did you…?”

“Yes.”

And then after a moment, they began to laugh.  At first quietly chuckling, then, as the reality of what had just happened hit them, full-blown belly laughs that wracked their bodies and didn’t relent for several minutes.

“I think we….. have something…. that we need to…. discuss,” Alura suggested, through her tremors of laughter.  She was laughing so hard, tears were streaming down her cheeks, and Lucy was in the same state.

They spent the next two hours talking.   They moved to the bed, took off their clothes, wrapped themselves in each other’s bodies, and began to confess to each other how long they each had been feeling this way.  Susan was special; she was unique, and brought something to them that they had not had before.  She did not, Alura observed, talk very much about her feelings, but she showed her caring constantly through action, beginning with the action of undertaking the task of learning the Raoite hymnals.  Alura had started to become aware of her growing affection only recently.  She confessed that she was intrigued by the way she felt watching them spar.  How she had always been untroubled by the easy way they interacted, because it was so different from how Lucy related to her.  She knew she was supposed to feel jealous, but she didn't blame Lucy for wanting her: that had existed for a long time, and more than that, Alura felt the same way.

Lucy mentioned how, when it began to be known around the agency that she and Alura were together, Susan was one of the few who had seemed truly happy for her.  That she had been disappointed to learn that she had missed her chance with Susan the first time because of James dragging his stupid feet.  She talked about the brilliance of Susan’s back and forth with the unknown signal, something that only she would have heard, a response that would only have occurred to her, that only she could execute in the way that she was.  Lucy loved Susan’s mind, there was no way around that.  It became clear to Lucy as they discussed it that she had always felt something, and had always been thwarted by time and circumstance. Her love was not for the role that Susan played, but for Susan herself.  It was a worthy question, but she had her answer.

“She deserves love and happiness,” Lucy said.

Alura stroked Lucy’s hair.  “I would like for us to give her that.”

Lucy smiled.  “I’m glad we agree.”

“I would also very much like to experience the strength and dexterity in her fingers.”

Lucy yelped with surprise, then laughed.  “What?”

Alura’s eyes lit up the way they did when she was feeling playful, and she reiterated, “I would like her to... treat my body as she does her instrument.  Would you not like to hear the tones she might produce?”

“Oh my god,”  Lucy groaned, not only because she was surprised to hear Alura say something like this, but also because her mind took the liberty of supplying an image of Susan’s fingers roaming Alura’s body and she flushed at the very thought of it.

Her mind then took the liberty of imagining her own body being touched with the same delicate authority that Susan used on the piano keys, and she shivered with delight.  She curled closer to Alura.  “Are you sure you can handle seeing me be intimate with someone other than you?”

Alura shook her head.  “I’m not sure at all.  But with Susan, I want to try.  And you?”

“Oh, I definitely want to try.”

Smiling, sighing, they finished their lovemaking, and fell asleep resolving to open up to Susan.  


**SUSAN**

Susan was literally burning with shame when Alura had left that night after dropping in on her patio.  She had seen this coming, all along.  How could she not?  She’d always liked Lucy, of course.  They had a history together, a chemistry that was undeniable.  And Alura was this radiant, incredible being who, if you were lucky enough to win her affection, had a way of making you feel like the most important person on the planet.  So this disaster was inevitable.

She kept telling herself that nothing had happened, that all she’d done was play a song while Alura stood there with a hand on her shoulder.  But it was… intimate.  Intensely so.  Susan knew that she was playing with too much feeling, too much fire, and she knew damn well that Alura could feel and see and smell all the responses of her body when she touched her, was perfectly well aware of what it was doing to have her standing this close while she was baring everything to her.  She knew that Alura knew what she felt in that moment, and she hadn’t stopped playing.  She’d just kept going.  She’d just laid out that wanting, let it all come crashing out of her on the ivories, and Alura just stood there and bathed in it.

It almost would have been less intimate if they had simply gone and fucked.  This was somehow worse.  There was no way Alura didn’t know everything about how she felt now.

Susan’s heart lay heavy in her chest when she went to bed that night.  She was aching, and for what, she couldn’t even say.  She supposed she just wanted to be loved, wanted love like what Lucy and Alura had.  The three of them had lately lapsed into a kind of closeness where Lucy and Alura didn’t take as much care to be discreet around her, where she could see the love in the way they looked at each other, didn’t trouble themselves to keep their kisses quite so brief or their touches quite so chaste.  It wasn’t that she even wanted to steal one of them away from the other; she’d just be happy to be in the middle of it.

But things didn’t work that way for her.  Alex Danvers and her thing with Alura’s sister and that hot little ex-cop... that was unique.  Things like that didn’t happen to most people.  And they sure didn’t ever happen to Susan Vasquez.

She’d been happy at first, to find herself being able to enjoy being closer with Lucy, and getting to know Alura.  They were supportive of her, they intertwined with her in such an easy, natural way.  But more and more lately, she had been feeling that her need for their company was crossing over into her wanting something she didn’t have a right to.  They insisted that it was fine that she was with them all the time, that they missed her when she wasn’t around.  But she doubted that they’d feel the same way if they knew the thoughts she was having about both of them.  She doubted that they’d be likely to enjoy any more baseball games sprawled across each other on the sofa if they knew that she was wishing for something else to be happening on that sofa.

Of course, sometimes she wasn’t.  Sometimes she simply enjoyed the physical closeness, the relaxed affection of times like those.

But sometimes, she was.

And now, Alura knew.  There was no way she didn’t.  Susan had found her reaction hard to read, but she was worried that she had made her uncomfortable or put her in a position that they would both regret.  

 _Nice job, Vasquez,_ she thought bitterly.  After alternating between crying and beating off for about an hour, she went to sleep miserable.

 

*****************  


She avoided Lucy and Alura for a few days while she tried to get her head right about what the fuck she was supposed to do with this.  She hoped Alura had the good graces not to discuss that moment they’d had.  

But she couldn’t be around them, not together, and even facing Lucy at work was difficult.  In the last couple of days, she’d seemed a little friendlier, and kept trying to coax Susan over after work with this or that enticement.  Susan didn’t quite have the gumption to admit to her what was going on.  She didn’t see how she could continue being so close with them while she was feeling the way she did.

When Lucy would leave at the end of the night, and try to drag Susan with her, Susan would stay at her work station, mumbling something about having to clean up a signal from somewhere or other.

She’d ransacked the DEO closets and signed out a few pieces of comms equipment, deciding that if she picked up any signals from her mysterious friends this evening, that she’d respond with an entire movement of something, and see what they did with it.  And she’d decided that she’d much prefer to do that from her piano.

So she sat here, feet up, staring at the glowing screen.  Whoever they were, they’d been sending back progressively more complex phrasing, these mysterious jam partners of hers.  She sent them Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff and Bartok and they’d diced it up and sent it back with a challenge.  She’d send back whatever they sent her, and then tag on a few bars of something else at the end.  Last time it had been some John Cage.   _Let’s see what you have to say about that, motherfuckers._

It was a weird sort of call and response.  

She’d not heard back since her last transmission.  She was just listening, now.  She was sitting with her third cup of coffee in her metal travel cup, earpiece in her ear, listening.  Would they send back something tonight?  She hoped so.  She was low on distractions right now.

She stared at the screens, fiddled with the reception, checked the feeds from multiple satellites.  She tried not to think about how nice it would be to be on the couch with Lucy and Alura, the three of them sloppily leaning all over each other and watching baseball.  

She wondered if Lucy’s mouth was as soft as it looked.

_Fuck._

And then, her screen went white.  It was filled with nothing but static and snow, for a full seven seconds that felt like an eternity.  She began fiddling with the connections between her laptop and the uplink module, thinking she’d somehow kicked something loose … but no.  

It wasn’t that.

Because she heard, in its entirety, from the very beginning to the last four bars of music she had sent, the entire result of her strange, interstellar collaboration playing through the speakers on her laptop.

And then a strangely cheerful voice:  “It has taken us some time to locate you.”

Susan fiddled with her earpiece, so nervous she almost knocked it right out of her ear.  “Who … am I speaking with?”

The voice sounded male, though one could never be sure, given the array of genders available throughout the galaxy.  It sounded smooth and well-rehearsed, as though it spent a great deal of time talking to strangers.  “I am T’omak _._  I venture to guess that you have not heard of me.”

Susan took a deep breath, trying to steady her head and her hands.  “Well you’ve guessed right.  My name is Susan Vasquez.  I’m going to venture a guess that you haven’t heard of me either.”

T’omak seemed amused by this.  “Not by name, but your broadcasts have been very diverting.  The musicians in my troupe are intrigued.”

“Your uh, your troupe.”

“Indeed!  They would dice up your transmission and send it back and then wait with great anticipation for the next.  It's rare that they find themselves so challenged.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them, and tried to get her brain around what she was hearing.  “I'm glad to hear that?”

She had a lot of questions.  A lot.  

“So, uh… What kind of a, uh, troupe are you, exactly?”

“Ah, I believe you would call us a ‘circus’, as we are a traveling show, though perhaps grander in scale than what the word brings to mind for you.”

A circus.  “Were you guys trying to reach me with that initial signal?”

T’omak paused.  “Not you specifically.  It's sort of a … Ping.  A way of feeling out new sectors, several star  systems at a time.  We put it out and see what we get back.”  Another pause.  “In this case, we got… You.  You have been a delightful surprise, Susan Vasquez.”

“Er, thank you?”

“So, what else do you have?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Do you have more music?”

Susan paused.  She had a direct audience now, asking for more.  “How are you sending this signal directly to me?”

“Once we identified your GIDEON satellite as the point of broadcast, it was easy to trace it to you.”

“I see.”  She stared at the keys of her Bosendorfer for a few moments.  “Okay,” she announced.  “I think I’ve got something you might enjoy.”

“Wonderful!”  T’omak exclaimed.  “We await your transmission.”

Susan shook her head.  She knew that she really ought to contact Lucy and let her know what was happening.  This was well outside of protocol.  But this …  she just needed it to be hers, just for a few minutes.  So, after a moment’s consideration, she launched into Shostakovich’s Op. 12 No. 1, a dizzying display of rippling dissonance.  It had always sounded so fantastically raw and wild to her, and it felt right for the moment.  She hammered it out with her usual muscular precision, for a moment forgetting that she was playing for the most unusual audience she ever had.  She was just playing.  She was just letting herself live in a moment of brilliance.  She wasn’t even thinking, in that instant, about Lucy and Alura and what a fucking mess she was.  She was strong, confident, competent.  

When she finished, there was a pause, and Susan wondered whether T’omak had gone away.  But then a burst of raucous vocalizing jumped through her computer speakers.  After it had subsided a little, T’omak’s voice came again.  “Wonderful!” he exclaimed.  

“Thank you.” _Was this real?_

“May I show you what we do?”

“Um, sure?”

Her laptop blinked, and then it began playing a video.  It showed a bright disc, descending into a large, open area and a crowd gathering around it.  It was a ship, she realized, presumably, T’omak’s ship.  Hatches opened in the top, and a crystalline construction unfolded itself from the ports, arching over it like a portable cathedral.  Lights glittered along its surface.  More hatches opened, and two raised platforms pushed up into the light, populated by musicians playing the most oddly stirring, alien music.  Hatches opened in the sides of the ship, and she watched for… well, she wasn’t sure how long, as one act after another emerged and dazzled the crowd:  a team of acrobats with jet packs and illuminated clothing, who formed themselves into various flying shapes and forms: strange, complex geometry, flocks of birds, sea creatures.  A dozen great beasts with glittering, green haunches and leonine ruffs around their heads that fluttered like banners came prancing down another set of ramps and performed something that Susan could only describe as a balletic routine on the ground in front of the ship, illuminated by its lights.  She couldn’t tell if the ruffs were fin, fur or feather, but they shimmered and fluttered around their giant eyes, uncurled down over their proud chests.  Yes, it was a circus, but it was also beyond anything she had ever seen.  

“They look like giant Pokemon,” she joked under breath, mainly for her own benefit, since she was pretty sure T’omak would miss the humor.

“What do you think?”  his voice came through her speakers after a moment.

“Well, it’s impressive.  Of course we do kind of frown on the whole trained animal thing.”

T’omak laughed.  “Trained animals?  Oh no no, you misunderstand.  The yazirin are highly intelligent, highly paid, and highly sought after performers.  Perfectly sentient and very well treated.  Divas, if I’m being honest with you, and they drive a hard bargain in contract negotiations, but they’re enormously popular.”

Susan shook her head.

“So,” T’omak inquired after she’d had a moment to absorb it all, “do you think that your people might be ready to receive a show like ours?”

Susan whistled.  “First off, I don’t know how we’d pay you, since we’re not plugged into whatever intergalactic financial system you all have going on up there.  Secondly … we, uh… we have aliens here, but it’s a pretty touchy issue.  Not everyone is happy about it.  And honestly, I’m kind of afraid our trigger-happy military would try and nuke you.”

T’omak chuckled.  “I was afraid that might be the case.  Well, no matter.  We’ll pass for now, I suppose.  But… let me ask you something, Susan Vasquez.”

“Yes?”

“Could you be enticed to join our show?  We have nothing like you.  Our musicians are utterly enthralled with you, and that’s good enough for me.”

Susan scratched her head.  “What?”

“Would you be interested in touring with us?  You would be a featured member of our ensemble, introducing your art form to worlds from one end of the galaxy to the other.”

Susan scoffed, not really believing that this conversation was taking place.  “I don’t know, how’s the pay?”

T’omak laughed.  “Talking to the yazarin already, eh?  Well, your compensation would be fair, surely.  Meals and lodging are obviously included.”

A strange feeling, a chill, crept over Susan as she listened.  He wasn’t joking.  This was an offer, legit and tangible.  “For how long?”

“Well, measures of time are rather difficult when dealing with intergalactic contractual agreements.”  A long pause ensued, as he seemed to be calculating something.  “Two of your Earth’s sun cycles, would that be acceptable?  With an option to renew?”

“You’d bring my instruments?”

“Of course.”

“Both of them?  I can’t live without both of them.”

“Of course.”

Susan’s breathing tightened.  This wasn’t happening, was it?  She wasn’t negotiating a contract with a fucking space alien to literally run away and join the circus, was she?

“You hesitate,” T’omak observed.  

“I need to see you, dude,”  Susan said finally.  “I need to know I haven’t lost my mind and am just making all this up.”

The laptop screen flickered again.  A face appeared.  Narrow, pale, greying around the edges, with wide violet eyes and an affable smile.  She wasn’t sure she trusted it.  Then again, with the tech they clearly had, she didn’t imagine it’d be that hard for them to kidnap her if they felt like it.

“Satisfied?”

She sighed.  “Sort of.”

“Then what is your hesitation?”

Susan didn’t answer.  She didn’t really want to discuss her personal woes with an alien ringmaster of some high-end intergalactic circus.

“Your profession?” he guessed.

She shook her head.  “I like my job, but I don’t love it.”

“A lover?”

She sighed.  “Yeah, I guess… there’s this thing, but it’s going nowhere fast…”  

This was a way out.  She could get away from everything.  And she could tour.  Space!  She could see space!  Forget playing concert halls in Europe, she could perform on far-off planets!  Maybe it was a solution, just maybe.

“Then what?”

Susan chuckled a little.  “I guess it’s just a little sudden.”

“Think on it a moment,” he offered.  “But don’t take too long.  We’re not staying in this system for very long.”

Later that night, she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.  Then she rolled over, opened her laptop, and raised the signal through GIDEON.  “T’omak? It's Susan Vasquez. Come get me.”


	6. Song of Transcendence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alura recognizes the people that took Susan.
> 
> Lucy has a "hold my beer" moment and drags Alura with her.
> 
> Susan gets some love advice from a telepathic, genderfluid, sparkly, green space lion.

**Song of Transcendence**

We are one with you, Rao,   
Part of your design,   
Millennia in the making.   
We are more than small, soft beings,   
More than flesh and bone.   
We are lines of code in a cosmic plan,   
Particles of light, molecules of   
Hydrogen, oxygen,   
We are atoms that are part of an order   
More divine than we can even comprehend.

We are one with you,   
Striving with each generation   
To draw closer to your image,   
To transcend the these vessels   
That hold our beating hearts,   
The tides of feeling,   
The dominant of having and    
The recessive of wanting.

Help us see with your benevolent eye,   
The greatness of creation   
If we can only find the will toward   
Transcendence.

  
  


**ALURA**

Alura was cheerful that morning.  She made Lucy breakfast, cleaned a little, and puttered around, already trying to work out in her head what it might be like to have Susan as a full partner in their relationship.  Would it change how they spent their time?  Would they eventually move into Susan’s place, as it had so much more room?  

And sex, what would that be like?  She was intensely curious, but could not quite bring herself to call Astra and ask how it worked for them, at least not yet  She suspected it was the sort of thing that they would be best off figuring out on their own anyhow.  She wanted to call Lucy because her mind was swimming with thoughts about this in particular, but Lucy had told her before that she couldn’t really talk about that at work.  Alura thought it was very funny the way Lucy’s voice would get a bit tight on the phone and Lucy would give very vague, careful answers to Alura’s baldly direct questions, which were usually something like:

_ “You tasted different this morning.  Have you changed the flavor of your body wash?” _

_ “Is it normal that my hunger for you persists although we just had each other last night?  I cannot stop thinking about it and I find I want you yet again.” _

_ “How does one play with a ‘sex toy’ exactly?” _

_ “But why will you not answer this question?  Would you prefer to find me in undergarments only, or entirely naked when you arrive this evening?” _

Alura would then laugh quietly at the frustration evident in her lover’s voice, and Lucy would say with a stern growl that Alura loved, “I can’t talk about this at work. We’ll discuss this at greater length when I get home.”

That was how Alura knew that she would be ravished when Lucy arrived later.

But she would behave, today.  She would not call Lucy at work and ask her any of the many burning questions she had about what would be involved in bringing Susan to bed with them.

As it happened, though, Lucy called her.  At around 10 a.m.

“Is something wrong, my love?” Alura asked.

Lucy sounded tense.  “Have you checked your phone?”

“No,” Alura replied, growing uneasy at the edge in Lucy’s voice.

“Susan didn’t come in today.  And I have a voice mail from her that was apparently sent late last night, that I didn’t see until just now.”

“What does it say?”

Lucy sighed.  “It’s both maudlin and vague.  You know Susan.  Not so good with the words when she has to talk about serious things.”

“But what does it say?” Alura pressed.  

“Um….”  Lucy paused, and it sounded like she was maybe fumbling with something, or looking for a paper where she’d written it down or something.  “...I’m sorry this is sort of out of the blue… I hope you can forgive me… I’ve been offered an opportunity and I really have to take it…”  A heavy sigh.  “And then some crap about the two of us probably needing a break from her anyway or something.”

“I do not like the sound of any of this,” Alura decided immediately.  

“Anyway, she’s not answering her phone.  Can you take a spin out by her place and see if she’s around and just… fucking talk to her?  Find out what’s going on?  I mean, she’s never late, never misses a day, she’s the most reliable human I’ve ever met.  This is really not like her.”

Lucy sounded beside herself with worry, but in that way where she was trying not to sound like she was beside herself.

“Of course,” Alura agreed.  “I’ll call you as soon as I know what’s happening.”

She pulled on some slightly more respectable clothing and took off from the roof of their building, shooting upwards into the dazzling, sun-splashed sky.

  
  
  


******

  
  


She would never get used to these powers, she thought as she soared out toward the Hills.  She would never stop feeling that she was somehow impersonating the divine by using them.  It was hard not to feel like an impostor, in some strange way, even though she had never asked for them or expected them.  She was only meant to be remarkable in the ways that the Codex had planned for her, the ways that were according to Rao’s design.

But lately, since Susan had come into their lives and begun to breathe life into the Raoite hymnals, Alura had begun to question that design.  Her sister’s unusual love seemed born from it, yet Alura could not get around the matter that Astra was an aberration that the Codex had not planned for, and was made to suffer and die for the reward that Rao had given her.  Alura then wondered whether Rao cared for his children at all, given that he allowed their world to collapse into flames.  

And yet.  And yet when she performed the hymnals with Susan, with Lucy by her side, she felt his presence more strongly than at any other time in her life, barring, of course, those times in the temple in Argo City, those holiest of times.  If Rao had not loved her, if Rao had not had a plan for her, how could she arrived here?  How could she have been given this?

_ The galaxy is vast, _ she thought, and  _ yet it is small.  It is chaotic, and yet, its order is precise. _

She drew closer to Susan’s house.  The car was still in the driveway.  She touched down, and walked up the front walkway, a feeling of unease hovering in her stomach.  The front screen door hung halfway open, as if she were at home.  But it was quiet within.  If Susan were at home, she would likely be playing her piano.  Alura gently pushed the inner door open and called Susan’s name.  She got no answer. 

She stepped inside to the living room and saw the reason why she heard no music coming from Susan’s home.

Both of her pianos were gone.

She ran through the house.  Nothing else appeared to be missing at first glance, just the two depressions in the carpet and the dark spots against the walls where Susan’s two pianos used to sit, the ones she couldn’t live without.

She glanced around, her pulse quickening.  She saw Susan’s laptop.  She flipped it open.  She had some comms software up.  Some recording software.  A bunch of video and audio files queued up in a line.  She clicked the first one, with the most recent date on it.  Susan’s voice simply saying,  “T’omak.  It’s Susan Vasquez.  Come get me.”

_ T’omak.  Why did she know that name?   _ It nagged at her, like a forgotten lyric to a hymn she had not heard in some time, like a face she could not quite attach to its name.  She clicked the next one, time stamped a few hours prior.  It was a movie file this time.  It expanded to fill the screen.

She saw a grey-fringed face, narrow and pale, with violet eyes.  She heard his voice, synced with his speech, and heard Susan’s voice conversing with him:

_ “Satisfied?”  _

_ “Sort of.” _

_ “Then what is your hesitation? Your profession?”  _

_ “I like my job, but I don’t love it.” _

_ “A lover?” _

_ “Yeah, I guess… there’s this thing, but it’s going nowhere fast…”   _

_ “Then what?” _

_ “I guess it’s just a little sudden.” _

_ “Think on it a moment.  But don’t take too long.  We’re not staying in this system for very long.” _

Then it struck Alura.  T’omak.  She remembered now.  She remembered who he was.  She remembered the tears of her friends as they wept for the children of theirs who had run away with him.  This was… not good.   _ The galaxy is vast, and yet it is small.  It is chaotic, and yet, it’s order is precise. _

She called Lucy.

“Lane.”

“Susan’s car is here, but she and her pianos are not.”

“What?!”

“It is worse than that.  I found her laptop.  These musical communications… they appear to have been with… someone I’m familiar with.”

“Oh?”

“Someone who … who takes people.”

“You mean they kidnapped her?”

“Not precisely.  He takes them, but they go of their own accord.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They are a circus.  They came to Krypton and left with a number of our youth.”

A long dead pause while Lucy digested this.  “So… you’re saying … that Susan…  _ our _ Susan… may have… run away to join the circus?”

Alura sighed heavily.  “Precisely.”

“Are you sure?  Why would she do that?”

“Why does  _ anyone _ run away to join a circus?” Alura cried, frustrated.  “I… I believe she had feelings for us that she didn’t wish to confess because she believed we didn’t share them.”  

“Are you sure about that?”

Alura related the bit of the conversation in which she heard Susan refer to a romantic thing that was “going nowhere fast”, and then, she sighed heavily.  “There is also something I did not mention when we discussed our feelings the other night.”

“What’s that?”

“I suspected before this that she had some feelings for us.”

“Why?”

“Because… well, watching the two of you spar, I was aware of her looking at you a particular way.”

“And?"

“And the other night, when I came by here, we had a … a moment.”

“Explain.”

“It… it’s difficult.  But, she and I … she was playing a song, on the piano, a beautiful, aching song, and I placed my hand on her shoulder and… I could feel her heartbeat spike, I could feel her skin respond to me … I could feel that her breathing changed.”

“All you did was touch her shoulder?”  Lucy sounded skeptical.  Alura understood why.  It sounded ridiculous, she supposed.

“Yes.  But… it felt as though I had done so at a moment of vulnerability for her.  She seemed uncomfortable when she finished playing, almost ashamed, and she made no move to embrace me when I departed, as she normally would.”

Lucy’s voice became agitated.  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

Alura sighed.  “For the same reasons that you waited to tell me of your own feelings for her until it could no longer be avoided.  Because it was uncomfortable and you feared you were doing something wrong by entertaining them.”

“But once we were talking about it, why didn’t you tell me that you thought she might have…?”  Lucy dropped her voice, but she still sounded quietly angry.  “...feelings for us, too?”

Alura sighed.  “Because, Lucy, I was afraid that I was perhaps misreading the cues.  You know that I still struggle with these things.  And Susan is… not like other people that we know.  I knew I wanted her in that moment, but I didn’t want to be wrong about assuming what her feelings were.  Do you understand?”

Lucy understood.  But she wasn’t happy.  

“Come meet me at the DEO.  Bring Susan’s laptop with you.  I don’t know if we can still trace her but if we can, we won’t have much time to catch up with her.”

  
  


**LUCY**

Lucy hunched over the desk, whipping through the files on Susan’s laptop.  She had Winn Schott at DEO Central on the speakerphone on her desk, and Alura stood beside her, wringing her hands while they spoke.  

“Well, what does it look like?”

He hedged.  “Honestly, Lucy, it could be coming from anywhere.  And… and we don’t know what type of FTL drive they have, and there’s a million way they could be using satellite interference or, jeez, even the moon, to camouflage their trail.”

“That’s not helpful,” she rebuked him.

“Actually,” Alura interjected, “I’m fairly sure that they were using proton through-put drives not dissimilar to the ones in Krypton’s large freighters.”

Winn paused.  Lucy smiled.  She had gotten so used to Alura living this life of domesticity with her, it was easy to forget that she had come from an advanced civilization.  

“Ah, well…”  The sound of Winn tapping away at the keys filled the room for a moment.  “The discharge from a proton through-put drive leaves a pretty distinctive trail.  It wouldn’t necessarily call attention to itself but… if we were looking for it….”

Lucy paced a little, thrust her thumbs through her belt loops.  After several attempts to draw a meditative breath, she reached the end of her patience.  “Come on, Winn. Tell me you have something.”

“Well…”  He paused.  “I think … yeah.  I got something.  And it is heading out of this system at a pretty good clip.  I mean… if you want, we can use GIDEON to try and signal it, but…”   


Lucy shook her head.  “Send me the current coordinates and the heading.”  The laptop plinked a moment later and so did Lucy’s phone.  “Thanks.”

“Okay, so… but…. What are you gonna do?”

“You remember that Kryian cruiser you repaired a few months ago?”

“Well, yeah…. B-but … you can’t just take that out for a spin, it has to be requisitioned, and … and we don’t even know it’ll hold up under actual FTL stress, Lucy….”

“Does J’onn have to approve it?”

“Yeah, of course, and you know he’s going to insist that it needs more testing before we take it out.”

Long pause.  “Okay, listen, Winn.  You don’t know that Vasquez is missing.  We never had this conversation.  You never tracked this proton-throughput drive.  If you discuss this with anyone, I’ll break your … no.  Alura will break your thumbs.”

Alura gave Lucy a horrified look but Lucy just smiled and put a finger to her lips.

“Why… why do I have to keep this conversation a secret?”

“Because I have a much faster way to requisition this ship, and I don’t want you to be an accessory to a code violation.”

  
  
  


**********

  
  
  


Lucy looked down at the two guards on the floor, feeling slightly badly for having knocked them unconscious.  Alura was fretting beside her.  

“They’ll be fine,” Lucy assured her, striding past their post.

She heaved the large metal door open, and saw, sitting in the dimly lit room, the Kyrian cruiser.   It was small, sleek, gunmetal grey, and hung suspended from the hangar ceiling by a number of steel cables.

“You know how to fly one of these?” she asked Alura softly.

Alura looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.  “What makes you think I would know how to fly a Kyrian cruiser?”

Lucy shrugged.  “You’re full of surprises.  How do I know what you know?”

Alura shook her head with exasperation.  

“Alright, well… I can pilot a huey, how different can it be?”

“I don’t know what a huey is,” Alura murmured.

Good sense had been shoved to the side for now.  “If we get stuck, we’ll call Winn,”  she decided.  

“Lucy,” Alura protested quietly, “this is reckless.  We are stealing a ship from your place of employment, which neither of us knows how to pilot, to chase a trail that may or may not lead us to the ship which may or may not have Susan.”

Lucy turned on Alura with a raised eyebrow.  “Do you want to let Susan go?”

“No, but–”

“Do you have any other ideas?  Because if you do, you’d better cough them up now, because Winn says that at their current bearing, we only have about a half hour to get this thing out of the hangar and into space, otherwise, we don’t have any prayer of catching them.”

Alura sighed.  She stared at the ceiling.  She stared at the floor.  She stared at the hard, forbidding rock walls.  It occurred to her that there was no large hangar bay doors out of which to pilot this small two-person cruiser.  “I hate to be technical,” she said, “but this is not actually a hangar.”

“Are you really going to split that hair with me?”

“Well,” Alura went on patiently, “there is no hangar door.  How do we launch?  For that matter, how did they even get it in here?”

Lucy frowned, stopped cold for just a moment.  Then she decided, “Easy.  You punch a hole in the wall.”

Alura groaned.  “Now we are stealing AND destroying property at your place of work.”

Lucy grinned.  “We’ll deal with the blowback later.”  She gripped Alura’s shoulders, kissed her beautiful face, and urged her, “Now come on, baby.  Get punching while I figure out how to fly the ship.”

Fifteen minutes later, Alura was standing in a swirling cloud of rock dust, with daylight streaming through the wall into the cavernous room.  She’d punched the whole thing open, with room to pilot the ship out and then some, since she wisely presumed she’d better give Lucy some leeway with piloting.

Lucy had clambered out of the cruiser and strode over to where Alura was standing.  She gave her a quick appreciative look.  She never showed her powers, but God, it was incredibly sexy when she did.  “I know what I’d like to do to you right now if we weren’t under a very tight deadline and in the middle of breaking several laws.”

Alura shook her head.  Lucy climbed back up the ladder into the cruiser, Alura floating alongside her.  When they reached the top, Lucy leapt lightly over the side and in,  while Alura hung back, looking suddenly apprehensive.   “Alura?”

Alura hesitated.  She looked at the small cockpit with the hatch that would close over their heads and encapsulate them for their trip. 

Lucy realized.  “Claustrophobia feeling sassy all of a sudden?”

Alura nodded.  “It is… too small.”

Lucy nodded with understanding.  She glanced at her watch.  “Listen, honey, I don’t know what’s going to happen up there.  But I know I can’t do this without you.  I can’t.  You’re way braver and way stronger than me, powers or no powers.”  She gave her a very soft look then, and added, “Besides, I’ve never been to space,.  I won’t know what to do when I get there.  But if you come with me, we’ll be together, and it’ll be okay.”

Alura smiled nervously, took a deep breath, and then heaved herself over the edge and into the co-pilot’s chair.  Lucy hit a button and the hatch closed over them, sealing them in.  Alura took a deep, shaky breath.  Lucy gripped her hand and kissed her cheek.  

“It’s okay,” she whispered.  “We’re gonna go get our girl, right?”

Alura nodded.  “Right.”

Lucy cranked up the speakers on her phone as loud as they would go.    She was not, generally speaking, a hard rock sort of girl, but clearly, this moment called for AC/DC.  “Highway to Hell,” she thought .  The opening riff ripped through her phone speakers.

She hit the ignition.  

Angus Young’s guitar roared in the tiny space.  

She adjusted what she hoped was the directional calibration and entered the heading that they had been given.  

The drums kicked in.

“Hang on, honey, here we go,” she shouted over the music.

She hoped that they didn’t die before they made it to space.  This would be a fairly ignominious way to go.

The cruiser lurched forward, out of the ragged gash that Alura had made with her bare hands in the rock wall.  Then they rocketed upward, into the blazing blue of the sky, up past where they could see the curve of the earth.  

Bon Scott was screaming about it the entire way.

  
  


***********************

  
  


When Lucy had decided that she wanted to try to be with Alura, she fell back on the ony thing that made sense to her; old-school romantic courtship rituals.  Flowers, chocolates, dinners, gifts, jewelry, the works.  She couldn’t go to Alura’s mother or father to ask permission so she sought Kara’s blessing instead.  Alura had been charmed, but bewildered, by the whole thing.  It had turned out that what made Alura fall for her were the accumulation of so many smaller, simpler gestures, the process from start until now that Lucy had undertaken to make this world a home for her.

She couldn’t begin to imagine what a brilliant legal mind from another star system who had never been in love before would want out of a courtship.  So she ended up just letting Alura experience her, and what it meant to spend time with one Lucy Lane, and that was what won her heart.  Not all the fancy stuff.  Not the big gestures.

This, however, was an occasion on which  only the big gesture would do.  It was all she could think of, and moreover, all they had time for.  They had to go get the girl, and they had to do it by chasing her and her circus ship across the stars in a stolen alien star cruiser.  

Alura was still sitting beside her, their third hour into the trip, breathing deeply and calmly.  Once they’d gotten into space, she’d requested some “less abrasive” music.  Astra loved the humans’ scratchy rock and roll, but Alura had concluded that it was not for her.  So they arced through the stars, soothed by the sweet sounds of the only Sarah Vaughan album Lucy owned.  

Something on the dash was blinking.  Lucy pointed.  “Hey!  Do you think that’s what we’re looking for?”

Alura pointed out of the clear, convex eggshell of the cockpit, to where a white disc hung in space.  Its size was difficult to judge in space, but it seemed large.  “That’s the ship,” Alura whispered.  “I remember it as if I last saw it yesterday.   


Lucy looked at the controls.  Her thumb settled on a large button.   “This should be the ‘turbo’ button,” she mused, preparing to hit it.

“Turbo?” Alura demanded.  "It sounds like something you made up.”

Lucy chuckled.  “I just mean it’s the button that will give a boost of fuel to the thrusters and–”  She hit it and the ship lurched forward, zipping toward the disc, which grew larger and larger in their cockpit window.

Alura pointed at another set of buttons.  “We should open a comms channel,” she suggested.

“Will they be receptive?”

Alura shrugged.  “I don’t know.  I never tried chasing them before.”

So Alura fiddled with the buttons while Lucy steered the ship toward the disc, which as they grew nearer to it, appeared to be the size of a not-insignificant house.  “This is Kyrian cruiser Jurisprudence, requesting comms contact with T’omak of the circus ship currently in this sector.  Please reply.”

Lucy glanced at her.  “Jurisprudence?” she chuckled.

Alura shrugged.  “I don’t speak Kyrian.  I don’t know what the ship is actually called.  We had to call it something.  I am a judge and you are a lawyer.”

Lucy couldn’t argue.

Alura tried several more times to raise the ship as they drew nearer to it. 

Finally, a voice came through the speakers in the dash.  “This is the circus ship Faz Paxamon, responding to your hail, Jurisprudence.  We are unaware of any violations that would warrant contact with the authorities at this time.”

“We are requesting an audience with a passenger on board your ship,” Alura pressed on.  “Susan Vasquez.  She is a person of great interest to us.”

A pause.  Then came the captain’s voice:  “This is Captain Goma Chelenik.  To whom am I speaking?”

“Exalted Jurist Alura In-Ze, and my traveling companion, Earth’s Major Lucy Lane, jurist for the United States military and Director of the Bureau of Extranormal Operations.”  Lucy looked at her incredulously.  Alura shrugged.  “We’re seeking an audience with one Susan Vasquez, who we believe is aboard your ship.”

“We are not aware of any obligation to disclose our passenger manifest to any Jurists from Earth.”

“I am not from Earth.”  Alura chuckled.  Lucy gave her a quizzical look.  “He knows his code,” she answered.  She took a breath and went on.  “Captain Chelenik, we know that Susan Vasquez is with you.  And we also know that removing members of non-interstellar spacefaring species from their planets of origin is against the Treaty of Sector Plural Alpha Three.  Now, we only seek a face to face meeting with her.  You can open a docking bay for us, or we can report your infraction to the Plural Alpha Three Interjudiciary Commission and then you will be facing possible extradition and fines.”

After a moment’s pause:  “Jurisprudence, please make your way to bay 16, opening in the lower aft decks now.  We will prepare to receive you.”

  
  


**SUSAN**

Susan lounged in the Faz Paxamon’s prodigiously large common room,  watching the stars slip past the large window and enjoying a steaming mug of something fizzy and purple with Zala, the largest and (in Susan’s estimation) prettiest of the yazarin.  Zala was a deep green, with sparkling pelt, watchful golden eyes, and a feathery white ruff that nodded and bobbed in slow-motion around her head.  It had taken Susan surprisingly little time to get used to the idea that something that was three times her size and that so much resembled a lion was able to hold conversation with her, albeit telepathically.  She watched the stars zip past as they conversed.

Susan still spoke aloud, as it was easier to manage her thoughts that way.

“Anyway, so that’s how I wound up here,” she was saying.  “Do you think I made a bad choice, running away from those two people?”

Zala yawned, lapped delicately at her mug of steaming, fizzy purple stuff, and then picked at her canines with the longest of her manicured claws.   _ Was it not possible for the three of you to exist as a pride? _

Susan frowned.  “Well, they were a couple… a… a  _ pride _ ... before I ever came along.  I just… didn’t think that I’d be able to just… insert myself into that.”

Zala licked her chops.   _ Two is not really a pride.  Three is a minimum.  Mine has six.  Plenty of room for you, I think.  _

Susan sighed, “Well, two is standard for us humans, usually.”

_ You are all female? _

“Um, yes.”

_ Well, perhaps one of you should switch. _

“Uh… yeah, that’s not as easy for us as it is for you.  Anyway, I’m not sure I’d want that.”

_ Pity.  I don’t blame you, though.  I always preferred being female. _

The doors of the lounge slid open, and one of the captain’s pages came in.  “Susan Vasquez,” he said softly, “I’m afraid you’re needed in docking bay 16.  A pair of jurists have arrived in a small cruiser looking for an audience with you.”

Susan looked at him, confused and surprised.  A pair of jurists?  What did that even mean?

“You don’t have a criminal record, do you?” the young page asked worriedly.

“Of course not!” she snapped.  Turnstile jumping on the T in Boston when she was nineteen couldn’t possibly be the sort of thing that interstellar jurists were concerned about.

Zala gave what appeared for all the world to be an eyeroll.

Susan got up.  “I guess I’ll see you later, Zala.”

_ Good luck, human. _

  
  


********

  
  


She entered the docking bay to find Alura and Lucy standing in front of a small, two-man craft.  Her jaw dropped.  She ran over to them.  “What are you doing here?”  she gasped.  

Lucy grabbed her, embraced her, and then kissed her on the mouth, passionately and without reservation.

Susan struggled to find a word for what she felt.  She had not thought to see either of them for a long time.  She had thought to never get the chance to taste a kiss from Lucy Lane.  But what about Alura? What was this?

Before she could utter a word, Alura embraced her too, from behind, and whispered into her ear,  “You foolish human, you are worse than Lucy with your recklessness this time!  How could you think to run from us like this?”

Susan stammered for a long moment.  She stood sandwiched between the two of them, who were holding her very tightly and not letting go.  Then she felt Alura plant a warm, moist, purposeful kiss on the side of her neck.  And Susan felt weak.  And her heart was pounding out of her chest.  

And she was very confused.

The guards in the bay appeared to relax.  “Susan, you know these women?”

“Yes!  Yes, Jesus!” she snapped.  “Go away.  Tell Chelenik and T’omak it’s fine.”  She closed her eyes and let the two of them support her for a moment as she stood there, feeling ways that she never imagined she would.

“I don’t understand why you ran from us,” Lucy murmured, and kept kissing her.  Susan didn’t know what to do but kiss back.

“I don’t understand why you two are here, or how,” she answered in between these emphatic, heart-stopping kisses.  “Or why you’re both kissing me.”

“We traced your signals.  We knocked out two soldiers, punched a hole in the wall at the DEO and stole a spaceship,” Alura told her, softly kissing her temple, cheek and jaw.

Susan breathed deeply.  “That sounds like a Lucy Lane idea.”

“It was,” Lucy answered.

“Why are you kissing me?”  Susan demanded.

“The same reason we did all of that stupid, reckless shit,”  Lucy replied.  

“We love you, Susan,” Alura said, softly but with conviction,  “We could not let you leave.”

Susan’s head spun.  “Let’s... take this elsewhere,” she decided.

  
  


*******

  
  


Susan had been settled into a large, comfortable suite in which resided both of her pianos.

She couldn’t live without both of those either.

They lay sprawled together on the bed, much as they used to do when they watched baseball games together.  Lucy was still in her DEO blacks, and Alura still dressed in loose khakis and a long, soft sweater in cornflower blue.  Susan was in between them, her head resting against Alura and her legs thrown over Lucy’s lap.

“You could have told us, you know,”  Lucy was scolding.  “We felt the same way.  We had just had a long talk about having decided that we felt comfortable with the idea of opening our relationship to you… I mean, in a more official way.”

“You were already part of us,” Alura added, playing with Susan’s hair.  “We only needed to open our eyes and accept what was happening.”   


Susan shook her head.  “You’re both crazy.”

Lucy scoffed.  “Damn right.  We stole a spaceship that neither of us particularly knew how to fly and chased you across the solar system.   _ Space _ , Susan.  Look at us.  We’re in  _ space _ !  That part isn’t my fault!”

Susan laughed, and had to admit that Lucy wasn’t entirely wrong.

“Anyway,” Alura went on, “they tell us that the limited range of that cruiser means that we can only remain aboard for another few hours at best, and then after that reaching Earth again will become an issue.”

“So,” Lucy pressed, tugging at Susan’s collar.  “Will you please come home with us, Susan?  You didn’t have to run away.  You didn’t do anything wrong.  You were just feeling the same thing we were all feeling; that we work better as three than as two.”

“You did not have to run away to space just to escape your feelings,” Alura added.  

Susan smiled.  “I don’t know.  I… I love you both, I really do.  But… I don’t know if I fit, not in a real way, a long-term way.  And … I did leave because I was running away from my feelings, but… this is really the biggest opportunity I’ve ever been given.  Touring the galaxy!  Introducing Rachmaninoff and Dvorak and Stravinksy to other worlds!  Playing on all kinds of different planets, alien concert halls, and… and the yazarin!  Have you seen them?”

Alura nodded.

Lucy looked bewildered.

“Highly intelligent, telepathic, genderfluid creatures who resemble sparkly green lions and perform a highly celebrated form of dance,” Alura explained.

Lucy stared blankly for several seconds while she digested that information.   “Okay, then.”

Susan closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself to sink into Alura’s arms.  It felt wonderful.  It felt like home.  So did Lucy’s touch as it roamed her legs.  “You have such a beautiful love that I can’t help wanting to be part of it.”

“You can,” Lucy insisted.  

Susan opened her eyes and looked at Lucy.  Beautiful, tough, crazy Lucy, with the blazing eyes and the gleam of her flushed cheek.  “Forgive me, Luce.  I know it’s working out for Astra and Maggie and Alex, but  I’ve seen a few of these kinds of situations go sideways.  More of them than not, actually.  My skepticism never shuts off.”

Lucy wriggled out from under Susan’s legs and crawled up the bed, and she kissed Susan gently on the mouth.  “Don’t you think it’s worth trying?”

Susan sighed.  Kissing Lucy Lane.  It was as pleasant as she’d suspected it would be.  “How?  I mean, really, how?  I signed a contract.  Would you stay here with me for two whole years?”

“Why not?” Lucy answered with a shrug.

Alura was silent.  She didn’t seem so sure.  

“And even if you did, and let’s say you liked it here…”  Susan sighed.  “I just… I think my needs are too different from most people’s.  I think there’s a reason why my relationships keep ending in disappointment.  It sucks being a disappointment to one girlfriend, I’m not really sure I want to try being a disappointment to two.”

Alura rested her chin on Susan’s shoulder and laid a soft kiss against the side of her neck.  They were quiet for a long moment.  “Susan, we love you.  We didn’t pursue you because we had a fantasy of what you were.  We know what you are.  And that is what we want.  We are better together.”

They lay together.  Susan felt strange and sad and suddenly very pressured.  “How long did you say you had until you had to be back on the ship to return?”

“Three hours,” Alura replied.  

They lay there for a few minutes, curled together, with Susan between them, silent.  Susan drew Alura’s face to hers for a long, slow kiss.  If this was all they ever got to have, she wanted to make sure to imprint its memory on herself.  Then she turned her head, and it was as if she passed Alura’s kiss to Lucy.  She looked long and hard at Lucy.  “Are you sure this is really what you want?”

Lucy nodded.  She kissed Susan again, and her tongue brushed gently against her lips.  “Give that to her for me?”

Susan looked at Alura and kissed her as Lucy had done.  

This was good.  It was all she wanted, really.  All she had ever wanted.  

She sat up.  “I … I need to think about this for a minute,” she said, feeling suddenly restless and unsure of herself.  Nothing was as sweet as being held between Lucy and Alura and feeling their soft bodies cradling hers, as knowing that they had thrown caution (and probably sanity) to the wind to come chase her across the stars.  

But she needed to work out whether it was really right.

She left her suite and went to find Zala.

_ I hear your humans showed up, _ she remarked when Susan walked back into the lounge.

Susan nodded.  “They want me to come back to Earth, but I don’t think I want to.  I want to tour.  I want to see the galaxy.”

_ Well, that is a conundrum. _  Zala munched on something small and green and scaly that was still wriggling when she snatched it off the plate in front of her with her massive, graceful jaws.

“One of them offered to stay.  I don’t know if the other will want to, too.”

_ Then you could be a pride, _ Zala observed.   _ Why do you seem uneasy with this? _

Susan sighed and sat down.  She ordered herself another of the fizzy, steaming purple drinks.  “Because.  Honestly?  It’s the sex.  The whole thing terrifies me.  How will that even work?”

Zala gave a little rumble, and Susan could feel the amusement from her mind.   _ You mean mating?  That seems like a very silly human concern. _

“No,” Susan tried again.  “What I mean is, women often get disappointed because … I like sex– er, mating – but I just … it’s not the top of my list of ways to show love, and with humans, that’s a big deal.  People expect me to want to do it a lot.  It’s fun, but… I…”

Zala munched on whatever it was in her mouth.   _ Not everyone in a pride has the same functions, _ she observed.   _ That would be stupid.  Some overlap is good, but if that was not their primary reason for seeking you out, perhaps it will be less important than you think. _

Susan nodded.  Zala’s words made a lot of sense.

_ There is nothing wrong with being more or less interested in mating activities, Susan _ , Zala went on.   _ There are many different designs and the universe requires all of them. You deserve to be part of a pride that will accept you as you are and meet your needs as well as you meet theirs.  If you love them, go and see if they are willing.   Perhaps they will surprise you. _


	7. Song of Divine Love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alura confronts her own history with the circus and makes a decision.
> 
> Susan opens up about her fears of disappointing the two women she loves most.
> 
> Lucy chills out. A little. 
> 
> And this is how it all ends....

**Song of Divine Love  
** What we can know of love,  
We know because you have taught us  
Of your divine love  
A thousand times, and in a thousand ways

Love is a blessing, given freely  
Love is a bond that will never be cut  
Love gives strength to the weak  
Balance to the unstable  
Direction to the lost.

A thousand thousand years ago,  
We were lost  
Until you found us  
And loved us.  
Until you helped us strive  
And seek perfection  
To make ourselves ever more worthy  
Of your endless, boundless love.

But worthiness was never required.  
And that is the first rule of love.   
  
  


**ALURA**

Alura and Lucy remained together on Susan’s bed, holding hands loosely and staring at the ceiling.  

“What do you think she means by that?”  Lucy asked after a moment.

“By what?”

“She thinks her needs are too different from most people’s.”

Alura shook her head.  “I confess, I have no idea.”

Lucy frowned.  She turned to look at Alura, and finally asked her.  “So?  If Susan is willing to try this, are you willing to stay here?”

Alura sighed.  “With the circus?”

“Yeah.”

“Why is it so easy for you?”  Alura asked.  “Do you not feel tied to your life on Earth?”

Lucy shrugged.  “Yes and no.  Sometimes it felt like I was trapped in something that was decided for me, by circumstance.  Do you know what I mean?”

Alura nodded.

“I chose you.  And I chose Susan.  We chose each other, really.  And that … that matters.  When you just let your life happen to you, it can be like a prison. I chose healthy, and I chose right.  And if that takes me halfway across the galaxy, I don’t care.”  She kissed Alura once on the chin.  “When you started loving me, my nightmares got much better.  And when Susan became part of our lives, I stopped feeling the insane need to prove something by taking stupid risks.”

“Except for the one time when you stole a spaceship.”

Lucy chuckled.  “Yes, except that one.  But it’s a rare thing when you feel that someone heals a part of you.  You can’t just let that go.  I mean, this is the first reckless thing I’ve done since Susan saved my ass in Mercado.”

Alura nodded.  She didn’t disagree in the abstract.  She, too, had been a prisoner of circumstances beyond her control, and choosing to let herself love Lucy, to let herself want Lucy, was seizing some control, some choice, for herself.  

At first she couldn’t quite work out what was bothering her about this plan.  It wasn’t, she realized, that she felt so tied to her life on Earth.  Earth had Astra, and Kara, of course, but Lucy was here with her, and it wasn’t as if she was leaving behind some enormously rewarding profession.  And they would have Susan, presumably, if she agreed to all of this.  No, she couldn’t quite pin down what was bothering her.

“Alura, what is it?”

Alura sighed.  “It’s hard to explain.   I don’t want to be part of this circus.”

Lucy looked at her curiously.  “Why?”

Alura shrugged.  “It holds associations for me, I think, that are not positive ones.”

Lucy made a sympathetic noise.  “Well, this is a different situation that might call for a different perspective, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps,” Alura answered, unconvinced.  She still remembered singing the Song of Loss at the temple to pray for the return of those youth who had left with T’omak.

At this moment, a knock sounded at the door.

“Who is it?” Lucy called.

Through the comm system in the wall, a male voice sounded, slightly tinny, in the room.  “My name is Zan-Lo, ship’s council.  I’m seeking audience with Exalted Jurist Alura In-Ze.  Does she occupy this room, currently?”

Alura sat up, exchanging confused looks with Lucy.

“I am here, Zan-Lo.  How may I help you?”

“I would like a word, please.”

She walked to the door and tapped the button to spring the release.  It sighed open.  Standing on the other side of it was a Kryptonian man, about fifteen years her junior, dressed in inoffensive dark travel clothes common to the Plural Alpha Sector.  He smiled when he saw her, and inclined his head respectfully.  “It’s a rarity we run into one of our own anymore,” he said, clearly pleased to see her.

She peered at him.  “Zan-Lo…” she said slowly.  “I knew your mother, Shuri.”

He nodded.

“She grieved when you left,” she said.  Despite being pleased to see another Kryptonian face, and a familiar one at that, she couldn’t entirely keep the disapproval from her voice.

Zan-Lo shuffled uncomfortably.  “I do not regret my choice.”

Alura gazed at him for a moment.  He was handsome.  She remembered him as a youth, remembered how his parents were so looking forward to him joining the military, as the Codex had bred him to do.  “Well, you are alive.  That is more than most of us can say.”

He glanced past her at Lucy, who was sitting on the edge of the bed, now.  “May I … prevail upon you to come and walk with me?”

Alura hesitated for a moment.  “Only for a little,” she relented.  “I may have to leave in some haste.”

Zan-Lo nodded with understanding.  

She stepped out into the corridor and they began walking.  “So, Zan-Lo, I take it you are not a soldier?”

He shook his head.  “I am not.  I am a documents specialist with T’omak’s organization.”

“You are a circus lawyer?” Alura said wonderingly.  

He smiled.  “Yes.  I realize that most people who bothered to run away with the circus would have become acrobats or something, but I was merely happy not to be a soldier, to be among those who brought color and joy to the world.  I learned the job from my predecessor.  I deal with performer contracts and work permits, travel dispensations and that sort of thing.”  He scratched behind one ear.  “It is not as glamorous as being an acrobat, but it suits me better.”

She nodded.  “Is that why you ran away?  Because you did not wish to be a soldier?”

Zan-Lo thrust his hands in the pockets of his tunic.  “Yes.  I had expressed this to my parents and they were not willing to listen.  T’omak did not have to make a place for me in his circus.  And yet I, a youth with few marketable skills, was taken on and taught to do something that I enjoy.”

Zan-Lo was slender and quiet, and though he was fit, he did not seem to have the build of a soldier, much less the temperament of one.  “Perhaps the Codex made a mistake,” she remarked with a wry smile.

Zan-Lo gave her a raised eyebrow.  “You would never had said such a thing then,” he remarked.

“I also had not watched my world collapse in fire, then.  It changes one’s perspective.”

He nodded, a sadness lingering around his dark eyes.  “Just so.”  He stopped walking, and turned to her.  “I do not know if you intend to stay for any length of time, but… when I heard you were aboard, I had to see with my own eyes.”

“I understand.”

He took her by the forearms.  “I hope you will not think me too forward, Exalted Jurist, but I am pleased that you survived.”  He looked around.  “This place is … chaotic.  But it allows for us each to be what we need to be.  It… is not so bad.”

She smiled awkwardly, and looked down at his hands gripping her forearms.  She gripped back, glad that she no longer had to worry about super-strength.  “Zan-Lo, I am pleased to see you.  I am sorry that you felt you had to leave Krypton to live as you wished and become what you felt you wanted to.”

They thanked one another for the respects exchanged, and he gave his leave, not wishing to consume any more of her limited time.

“I do hope you stay,” he called after her as he walked away.  

The prospect seemed less absurd than it had a moment ago.  

_ The universe is chaotic… And yet it's order is precise. _

  
  


**LUCY**

Lucy was pacing, opening the covers of Susan’s pianos, wishing idly that she knew how to play them at all, and closing them.

She wanted Susan to just say yes.  She wanted to stay in space.  She wanted Alura to stay with them too.  What was two years on Earth to give up to have what was sure to be the ride of your life?  Sitting here in this ship, she didn't blame Susan for not wanting to go back.  Lucy didn't want to either.

But it had to be the three of them together, or else what was the point of all this?

It had felt right, she thought, the three of them holding each other in that bed.  It had not even been so strange to see Susan turn her head and kiss Alura.  At least, not as strange as she'd thought it could be.  Not in an unpleasant way, she mused.

Susan was steady in ways that neither she nor Alura were.  Lucy had always ceded the spiritual part of the relationship to Alura and Susan, and what happened between them as Susan began to bring the Raoite liturgy to life.  But life with Alura had a kind of fragility to it, as they both navigated their love for each other amidst the scars of their individual histories.  Lucy simply had pushed it to the back of her thoughts, where it only reemerged from time to time as a bad dream, or a nasty twitch of the Fourth of July when the fireworks were going off.  Somehow, Susan’s presence had made it all feel less fragile.  Lucy would never lose the regrets she had accumulated in Afghanistan, but closeness with Susan had somehow lifted the burden a little.  Helped her to remember who she was, apart from that.  Made her feel that somehow, she didn’t have quite so much to prove to anyone.

Susan returned a few minutes after Alura had left to go walk with Zan-Lo.  Lucy understood, she thought.  

“Where’s Alura?” Susan asked, glancing around.

Lucy shrugged.  “The ship’s lawyer is this Kryptonian kid that knew Alura before Krypton was destroyed.  He left with the circus a few years before it exploded.  They’re having a word, I guess.”

Susan nodded.  She moved toward Lucy and pulled her down to sit on the edge of the bed.  “Listen,” she said.  “You have to understand that… I don’t know if I can give you what you want, and I can’t ask you to stay until you understand some things about me.”

Lucy squeezed her hand.  “Of course.  Just tell me.  We can work it out, whatever it is.”

Susan seemed uncomfortable as she sought the words to explain.  “I… my relationships never seem to work about because … I’m not… I’m not the kind of person who wants a lot of sex.”

Lucy gaped at her for a moment.  She supposed she hadn’t assumed one way or the other about that, but she motioned for her to continue.

“I mean,” Susan went on, “don’t get me wrong, I enjoy it, but it isn’t the big thing for me that it is for so many other people.”  

Lucy nodded.  “That’s why you were acting so weird after that night you played for Alura when she was there alone,” she surmised.  

Susan sighed, seeming relieved that Lucy understood.  “Yeah.  It was honestly more intimate for me, or… more meaningful, I guess, than if we had …”  She trailed off.  “Anyway, I just don’t want you to pull me into this thing you two have, thinking it’s going to be like…”  She waved a hand around.  “You know, whatever it is Alex has with Astra and Maggie.  They’ve all independently implied that they fuck a lot.”

Lucy laughed. Alex has given her more information than she needed about that.  “Yeah, that’s… that’s true.”  She took Susan’s other hand.  “Listen, though.  Is that really all it is?  You’re just worried that we’re not going to be happy with you if you’re not interested in a lot of sex?”

Susan nodded.  Lucy saw the tension and sadness in her face.  “That’s been pretty much the end of any relationship that meant anything to me.  They’d pick code words like,  _ you’re not expressive enough, you’re not demonstrative enough, I was hoping you’d be more passionate. _  But that’s really what it was.”  Susan’s thumb rubbed idly over the back of one of Lucy’s hands.  “It’s not that I don’t like it, or that I don’t want it ever.  I think I’d even enjoy being part of whatever it is for the two of you, when you two are in bed.  It’s just…”

Lucy shook her head, and placed a hand on Susan’s cheek.  She was overwhelmed with affection and sympathy for her; Susan didn’t want to drag the two of them across the galaxy when she was afraid she wasn’t going to be what they were hoping for.  “Suze.  You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.  We just want to be with you.”  

Susan’s look was wary, but slightly relieved.  “Are you sure?”

Lucy nodded.  “Look, Alura and I can keep up with each other’s needs that way.  What we want from you most is much more important than that.”  She let go of Susan's hand and rubbed her fingers over the short hairs at the back of Susan’s neck.  “Susan, I know I speak for Alura too when I say that, you’re completely in control of how you relate to us sexually, and that of course, _of course_ , we’ll do everything we can to expand our definitions and practices of intimacy to make them more comfortable for you.”

Susan looked as if she wanted to cry.  “I loved you both so much, but I didn’t think you would… I didn’t think you’d be happy with that because it wouldn’t feel for you like what a relationship is supposed to feel like.”

Lucy shook her head.  She was just so glad to be finding a resolution to this that would let them be together.  “Susan,” she said gently, “we love you.  We already decided that.  That’s why we’re here.  And, I’m not going to lie, I do hope there comes a point when you want us to do the things for you that we enjoy doing for each other in bed, but I’m just happy to have you involved at all.  We’re already sort of coloring outside the lines of ‘what a relationship is supposed to feel like’, you know?”

Susan leaned forward and touched her forehead to Lucy’s, closing her eyes.  The tension seemed to melt out of her.  

It reminded Lucy a great deal of how Alura has been, how her lack of sexual desire had made her afraid to fall in love because she feared what might or might not be expected of her, and didn't know whether she'd be able to give that.

“Susan,” Lucy whispered, newly aware of the idea that Susan's physicality was perhaps different from her own.  “Would you mind if if I kissed you?”

“You can always kiss me,” Susan answered with a little chuckle, and she tilted her face into Lucy’s, and they stayed for a moment, still and quiet, in the gentlest kiss.

“Thank God.”  Lucy’s heart was skipping in her chest.  This was a yes, she thought.  It felt like a yes!  Where the hell was Alura, she wondered impatiently. 

The door sighed open at that moment, and Alura entered, her jaw set and eyes blazing with purpose.  “You have begun without me?” she inquired, and her tone was filled with teasing.

“So?”  Lucy demanded.  “Are we staying?”

Alura nodded.  “We are in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time.”

“Huh?”  Lucy didn’t understand.

“The universe is chaotic, and yet its order is precise.”

“What?”  Lucy was still confused.  Was this more liturgical stuff?

“We are staying, if Susan is willing,” Alura said firmly.  “I will explain later.”  She came to them, and sat beside them, once again with Susan in the middle.  “Are you willing, Susan?”

Susan smiled.  “Yeah, I’m willing.  But we should have a talk first.”

  
  
  


**SUSAN**

Susan was overjoyed to find Alura to be even more understanding than Lucy.  Alura had, she explained, been surprised to find herself falling in love with Lucy, but it was not until a bit later that those feelings awakened her sexual desire.  Until that time, she had needed Lucy’s patience, her understanding of the fact that such feelings might indeed never awaken in her.  Susan had never really thought about that whole aspect of their relationship.

They would go slowly, then, and Susan would decide when, and what, and how much.  The exploration of the shape of their intimacy, the learning of its edges and curves and corners, would proceed slowly, over the length of their time in space.  Susan enjoyed watching them make love, appreciating the tenderness of it, the obvious pleasure they took in each other.  Sometimes it aroused her, sometimes it did not.  She often liked to lay in bed with them, sometimes helping, sometimes just kissing Lucy while Alura lay between Lucy’s legs, or holding Alura’s hand while Lucy slipped fingers into her.  Sometimes, she sat at the Bosendorfer and played something tender and beautiful that swirled around Lucy and Alura’s bodies as they lay tangled in each other.

Lucy loved the way Susan’s playing would create the mood and often told her so, told her that it made everything that happened in their bed more beautiful.  She felt it, body and soul.  But for Alura, it did something else entirely, and the right choice of piece could touch her so deeply, create such tender, powerful intimacy, that sometimes she’d be ready for Lucy before they’d even gotten their clothes off.  Claire de Lune in particular would make her quietly passionate, and Susan discovered, much to Lucy’s delight, that anything by Monk, anything with those blue notes that danced along her aching nerves, would have her so wet that Lucy could practically taste her from halfway across the room.

Susan also enjoyed warm, affectionate, deep kisses, and sometimes nothing else.  

Alura sang to her sometimes, with that gorgeous voice of hers, and sometimes they even composed music together, songs of beautiful, complex colors and melodies.  They’d left Susan’s Kryptonian piano at home, so they made do with Susan’s two regular pianos, but she wrung from her instruments all the dissonance and beautiful cluster chords and harmonies that sat close enough to make the hairs on the back of one's neck stand up.  And Alura, well...  She followed.  Beautifully.  Flawlessly.  But sometimes all it took was that sweet, high voice crooning Sarah Vaughan’s “Tenderly” in her ear for Susan’s heart to stumble and her breath to hitch because of how close it brought them.

If Alura was the one elevating Susan’s soul, Lucy was the one keeping her grounded in her body, making it her business to learn other physical things that Susan would enjoy.  They kept up a routine of sparring, both to stay sharp and to enjoy the physical closeness and the deep impact and press of muscle and bone and the scent of each other’s hair and sweat, and the sounds of each other’s breath.  Lucy befriended the Beljanite contortionists, and taught them Army combative style in exchange for the secret massage techniques that allowed their muscles to go slack and loose before a performance, and that helped them return to normal afterwards.  She then taught them to Alura, and they would often lay Susan down on the bed and attend to her until she had turned to putty.  

They loved Susan in ways that filled her with far greater pleasure than she’d ever gotten from sex.  

But sometimes … sometimes she just wanted them to do everything with her that they ever wanted to do, and the two of them would set to her eagerly and with joy, and kiss her with so much passion, and look at her with so much love in their eyes, it was easy to understand why they would have this all the time if she wanted it that way.  They would take delight in every inch of her, their warm mouths and careful fingers barely able to contain their thrill at sharing her this way.  Orgasm was a small miracle, a gentle death that left her feeling filled instead of drained.  

It usually happened when they were already in bed together and she was feeling particularly at ease, and she’d kiss one of them and say, “Hey, uh, do you… do you wanna…?”  And the question would trail off as they absorbed her meaning, and happily sighed in the affirmative.  And Lucy would chuckle and murmur, “Yeah, we wanna.”  

And there would be some soft laughter back and forth as they undressed her and made sure to be perfectly, entirely sure that this was the right thing, at the right time.  It always went some variation of this:

_ “Yeah?”   _

_ “Yeah, are you sure you want to, Susan?”  _

_ “Yeah, I’m sure.”   _

_ “Just know we’ll never say no.  If you change your mind–”   _

_ “I’m not gonna change my mind, Alura, just fuck me.” _

_ Quiet laughter. _

_ “Someone’s got her boots on tonight.” _

_ Alura, bewildered:  “Lucy, she is not wearing boots.” _

_ More laughter.   _

_ “Really, Susan, you want to?” _

_ “Jesus, you two.  Yes!” _

And they traveled!  They visited half a hundred sectors, two hundred worlds, from drippy, dank backwaters where it always rained to the majestic crystalline cities of worlds far more advanced than Susan could have dreamed.  Not every show was a winner but every show was a new experience, a wonder that she would hang onto for the rest of her life.  

Zan-Lo, as it happened, left the circus shortly after Alura’s arrival, to settle on a verdant world with a pretty, blue-eyed Ulean plasma surfer, with plans to marry and raise children.  Not born from the Codex, but real faith births, just as Lara and Jor-El had done.  What survived of Krypton now would be preserved in the genetic code of an unseen child whose destiny was unwritten, who would be part Kryptonian, and part Ulean, and entirely beautiful.  “You should name your first child Chance,” she teased him as he was leaving.  But Zan-Lo liked it.

Alura took over his duties for the remainder of the tour.  She didn’t seem to mind entirely, getting to sharpen her mind on the minutiae of interstellar permit law, but she seemed happier actually to be away from Earth and not have to deal with her powers.  They’d come back, of course, if the show went anyplace with a yellow sun, which was common enough, but the reprieves seemed welcome.

Lucy became more meditative.  The fire never left her eyes, but she was was less ill at ease.  She had spent so long as a soldier, it seemed a relief to no longer be one, constantly bearing the weight of the Silver Star she had never asked for.  When Alura related Zan-Lo’s story, Lucy’s eyes welled up a little, because although she had not been a product of engineered pre-destination, it seemed sometimes as though she might as well have been.  

She seemed grateful to be Susan and Alura’s girlfriend and little else, until she found herself a vocation at the circus.  She took to recording their experiences and writing things down, taking video, photographs, whatever she could, documenting their journey.  She even interviewed T’omak, and, through an interpreter, Zala (Zala seemed oddly proud of them for having sorted themselves out, although she recommended adding to their pride at some point).  This would be a work of Pulitzer prize winning journalism, she declared, and Lois could suck it.

Susan had found something she’d never imagined.  She had found a home, a place that accepted her as she was, people that loved her without qualifiers or reservations.  It was not the way she had imagined it, the way she had been trained to expect it, but it could not have been better by design.  She had found her pride, and their functions were different but overlapped in all the best ways.

After their return to Earth, they scuffled a little with the DEO.  Lucy somehow lawyered her way out of trouble by having arranged, in their travels, to return the stolen cruiser to Kryos, since it was on the way to one of the circus’s tour stops anyhow, thus making it a return of the property to its original owners rather than a theft.  To describe J’onn as irritated with her would be putting things very mildly.  He was, however, rather pleased for Susan, whom he valued enormously but had always known was too much of a musician to remain a spy forever.

As predicted, Lucy did indeed win a Pulitzer for her photojournalism project in space, along with a publishing deal and a hefty advance for her next trip out with the circus.  Lois seethed for a little while, but eventually they came to a detente.  After all, there weren’t many people on Earth who could relate to the pecularities of loving a Kryptonian.  It was foolish to turn one’s back on them, even if they were often a pain in the ass.  Lucy was honorably discharged from the armed forces, and the weight continued to lift from her shoulders.

Alura resumed her cooking, and learned piano from Susan, both standard and Kryptonian, and was happy to spend long afternoons with Lucy, helping her organize her photos, or brushing up on interstellar law for the next time she would go out on tour with Susan, or spending time in prayer with her sister and daughter, whom she was learning to relate to all over again.

_ The universe is chaotic, yet its order is precise. _

Alura and Lucy would move into Susan’s place in the Hills and rearrange the living room to accommodate the Kryptonian piano.  Susan would do more tours, sometimes with her two mates, and sometimes without.  Nobody understood that it wasn’t because their bond was loose, but rather because it was so strong, that it withstood intermittent distances.  She was pleased, though, that their relationship and their lovemaking didn’t really look like anything she’d ever seen or heard of, because it meant that she had finally found the right thing, uniquely and beautifully made.  

It was enough to make a girl believe in Rao.

Or at least, make her sing the songs.


End file.
